The Green Bucket

The Green Bucket


I look out my bedroom window. It is a Florida downpour. In the retention pond lies an enormous dead golden speckled Koi. I cannot imagine how it got there. Washed perhaps from the overflow pipe, dropped by a predator bird? I take it as a sign, an omen, a totem. The Okinawans regard koi as a sign of good fortune and prosperity.

My husband was drafted in the early days of Vietnam. He was lucky and was assigned to Okinawa and not to the midst of carnage. In our garage is a jadeite green bucket with a lid that he carried home with him from Okinawa and that we have kept all these years. It still
carries water.

We used it then to haul water from a reputed healing spring. Back home I used it for floor mopping and to soak our son's dirty diapers. Later I used it as a basin when David, my husband, was ill from the effects of chemotherapy. I use it now to hold David's cremated ashes.

I grab a coffee, quickly dress, find an umbrella, grab the bucket and walk down the road to the pond. Though it's probably illegal I take
the lid off the bucket and empty David's cremains into the pond, an offering to the Koi and to my husband. I wait as the ashes swirl and settle
and sink. The geen bucket goes back to the garage. I wonder what magic it will carry now.