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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.
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