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six little things 12: Our Family Secret

Who doesn't have a family? Who doesn't have secrets? Forthright orphans, that's who. But how many forthright orphans write prose poems? I couldn't tell you. I mean, would you count people who write them but don't publish them? Or those who write things which, discovered and published, might be considered prose poems by the general prose-poem audience but were considered something else entirely – bird-book entries, recipes, letters, status updates – by their author? Given the desire to count such people, how could you, practically speaking, manage the task? And as for the label "orphan" – would you count only those destitute of family from early childhood and entirely without memory of once having a family – that is to say, the prototypical "Annie" orphan – with the additional correlary of their being adult, independent, and irrevocably unadoptable – a permanent orphan? Would you say that an ophan who marries and has children of his or her own has come into a family, at long last? Indeed, can a grown person become an orphan, or is that a preposterous notion? Is only a child orphanable? An online dictionary attracted my notice by claiming to provide antonyms, but when I checked they did not actually have an antonym for the word "orphan." They had misled me deliberately. I submit that the opposite of an orphan must be a child with supernumerary parents.