Teddy was getting ready to bury the cat again, and old Moonpie, whose nine lives had been used up before he was fully weaned, was not protesting.  Like me, Moonpie had given up hope that Teddy would quickly outgrow this phase of her development.  Too old for protest but too feline for compliance, our silver tabby hung limply in my daughter’s thin arms like a burlap sack loaded with buckshot. Drag me off the picket line if you have to, Mr. Sheriff, but I’m not going to make it easy for you.

            “We’ve been over this,” I told my solemn-faced child.  “Just remember you can’t bury a living cat.  Even if you intend to dig him up again.”

            Teddy, tortoise-shell glasses pushed to the tip of her freckled nose, didn’t blink.

            “Well, I felt I had to say something,” I added.  Teddy’s blank stare seemed to demand more.  “Me being your mother, your moral compass, so to speak.”

            Ed came into the kitchen just in time to hear the last sentence. His blond hair was rumpled and his eyes heavy-lidded. My husband always appears faintly bemused, as if there’s some universal truth just out of reach, and if he only concentrates hard enough he’ll finally be able to grasp it.

            On this late summer Saturday morning, in jeans and an ancient Harvard sweatshirt, Ed looked more like someone the Consolidated Community Church had hired to dispose of the trash than the newest minister in an unfortunate lineup.  He opened the refrigerator and stared inside.  I think he hoped the orange juice would come to him.

            “If Teddy doesn’t have her own moral compass by now, she never will,” he said.

            The scent of a theological discussion was hanging thickly in the air, but we had been married for twelve years, and I could waft away this particular disagreeable odor without breaking a sweat.  I put my arm around his waist and kissed his hairy cheek.  Ed was mid-beard, an annual sprouting of red-gold fuzz that only resolved itself when the hottest weather made a beard unbearable.  Unfortunately it was almost September and the weather had not cooperated.  My lips tingled. 

            I stepped back and nudged the refrigerator door closed.  Ed didn’t notice.  Outside I could hear birds singing sweetly and tires squealing on the small street that ran in front of our house.  Summer noises in a small Ohio town where nothing ever happens. 

            “There are six new kitty graves in the back yard,” I said, “and the Women’s Society board is coming over in an hour to decide if we need professional help pruning the lilacs and forsythia.”

            “Pruning shrubs requires a visit?”

            “Be glad they aren’t deciding whether to buy us a new toilet seat.  That took two visits.  One to determine if the cracks could be repaired, and one to vote on the correct shade of white.”

            “They’re never as bad as you make them sound, Aggie.”

            “And you’re never around when they visit.  If they came at midnight, you’d climb out the window in your bathrobe and claim you were making a pastoral call.”

            He sent me the eyelash lowered, “too bad the kids are in the room” look that always turns my knees to jelly.  “I could try to be as bad as you make me sound.”

            The kids were in the room, and I soldiered on.  “Why don’t you shepherd the ladies around the backyard?  After you help Teddy fill in all her holes and change your shirt.”

            “There’s nothing at the bottom of any of these holes I should know about?”

            I shooed Teddy and Ed toward the door.  Moonpie, still passively resisting in Teddy’s arms, didn’t even twitch his ragged tail.  “You can give her some pointers on liturgy.  Her funerals need work.”

            “I know all the words to ‘Forward Through the Ages,’” Teddy told her father.

            I figured Teddy’s rendition would get them through the job of filling in the ersatz kitty graves.  I looked forward to the day our six-year-old daughter felt comfortable enough with death and funerals to move on to weddings or christenings, although I doubted Moonpie would stand for a long white dress.

            Ed has been the minister of the Consolidated Community Church of Emerald Springs, Ohio for most of a year.  Just long enough, I know from experience, to hear the applause die down and the whispers begin. 

            We’ve done this before, Ed and I.  Twice before, to be exact.  Once in a medium size parish north of Boston, the spiritual home of Unitarianism--which is our chosen faith.  Once in an urban Washington DC church, with politicians and bureaucrats sitting on one side of the aisle and those who were suspicious of them on the other.  That was my favorite, a culturally diverse, socially active congregation who stopped arguing frequently enough to perform a plethora of good works.

            I was not pleased, after that stimulation, to come here to Emerald Springs, with its small, conservative congregation and buttoned down rural charm.  I was not happy, but I came anyway. I’m a coward. I’d rather be a resentful woman than the wife of a resentful man.

            As Ed taught our daughter to sing "Morning Has Broken" while they filled in holes,  I cleared off the kitchen table, stacking dishes in the sink and cereal boxes in the pantry.  Then, on second thought, I took the dishes from the sink and stacked those in the pantry, too, behind the cereal boxes.  There was only so much time before the invasion, and it was better not to trumpet the fact that a casual caretaker had taken up residence in the Women's Society's beloved parsonage.