Stephanie Hashagen

            Went Full Thoreau

Even though they hadn’t spoken in decades,
my dad still hung a photo of his dad
in the downstairs hallway with
the rest of the family pictures:
There he was, my father’s father,
dress-uniform stern and
glowering next to my mom’s
gold-framed high school portrait;
harrumph-ing above the faded Polaroid
of me, standing on our lawn in Dallas
in the grocery-store Garfield costume
that I loved so much I wore it
two Halloweens in a row.

We had two photos of him, total,
in the whole house—
although the other photo was actually
just a picture of his cat in the woods,
but there’s snow on the ground and you can see
his shadow and maybe a boot print
if you look hard. I wouldn’t have known
it was his cat or his shadow,
but someone had printed right on the back:

Morning walk with Martha.
Lost Lake, 1978.

That’s the year my Dad’s Dad
went full Thoreau and
lit out for somewhere North
to live out the rest of his life
with Martha the fat orange tabby
in the type of cabin that
most people would only use
in the summer.

And even though I always
hated my grandfather 
for being an asshole,
for not going to my parents’ wedding,
for outliving my other grandfather—
the one I’d have actually wanted to meet—
I also think it’s kind of cute
that we both like cats.

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Stephanie Hashagen lives in Verona, Wisconsin with her husband and four cats. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Muleskinner Journal, Maudlin House, Rat’s Ass Review, Bramble, and Action, Spectacle. She is a claims examiner for a disability insurance company. She is deeply uncomfortable writing about herself in the third person.