Weasels in the Attic

We meet at school, or work, or maybe a store. Wherever it is, there's just a random group of individuals, right? Within that group, you find your mate. If you were in a different group, you' d end up with a different mate, right? But we never dwell on that. We live our lives in the groups we have - in our cities, our countries, even though we didn't choose them. Know what I mean? We like to tell ourselves it's love, that we're choosing our own partners. But in reality, we're just playing the cards we've been dealt.

My grandma told my dad that it was the mother weasel they’d caught, and that a whole family had been living up there. She said that sound—the mother weasel’s final scream—was a warning to the father weasel and their children. This house is dangerous . . . Don’t stay here or they’ll drown you . . . Leave and don’t come back . . . Goodbye. That’s why we had to do it here, my grandma said. Now they’ll never come back. And not just them. All their relatives, all the weasels in the area, they heard what happened. They know this house is the last place they want to be. Nothing to worry about. They won’t be coming back. It’s a good thing we got the mother, she said. When you get a baby, they just scream for help. Father weasels get violent and wear themselves out trying to chew through the cage before you can even get them in the water. The mother’s the best, she said. Then she put her hands together again and kept praying. And that was the last of the weasels.

Mhm. It’s water and sake, half and half. Bring it to a boil and add mirin and sugar . . . Katsuo is overkill, so I go with konbu. Then I finish it off with a little barley miso.

Wherever it is, there’s just a random group of individuals, right? Within that group, you find your mate. If you were in a different group, you’d end up with a different mate, right? But we never dwell on that. We live our lives in the groups we have—in our cities, our countries, even though we didn’t choose them. Know what I mean? We like to tell ourselves it’s love, that we’re choosing our own partners. But in reality, we’re just playing the cards we’ve been dealt.

Having kids completely changed their appearances. They stopped wearing makeup and bought different kinds of clothes. They changed the way they spoke. It was like they became different people.