Tuesday was beautiful-- the cream of fall's crop. It gave us leaves to crunch through, late blooming flowers to pick, bright sun, and rough wind. Fall is the life for me; living seems larger when it's laced through with warmth and chill, an errant wind, and the flurry of red and orange.
Tuesday afternoon, the girls and I took our should-be-daily walk, heading for the cemetery for the first time in months. The cemetery is one of my favorite places within a reasonable walking distance, partly because it holds quiet and privacy, along with birdsong, night-flitting bats, and, now that fall is here, an absence of mosquitoes. More than these, I love cemeteries for the same reasons that most cemetery seekers do, I guess. Drawn to an interaction with the past, with memories and emotions-- ours or another's-- the visual reminder of human frailty and loss, the hope of Life, and all other reasons (not the least of which is searching out interesting names).
When I walk alone, I visit a few favorite graves before heading up the hillside to the far back corner of the grounds. Here lie the headstones, some makeshift, of newborns and infants. A large rock with black paint scrawling out spidery letters of loss; a cross fashioned from metal bars of a crib base, festooned with a teething ring faded and worn by time, wind, and weather; bright toys for a baby who only lived a few days; painted, jolly pumpkins to mark the season; flowers fake and faded, fresh and living. The tokens, whether costly or tawdry, express the exact same thing. After, I like to walk past this into a woodsy area on the hill that is filled with older graves and heavy with quiet before heading homeward.
When the girls are with me, we tread roughly the same route, only with the spontaneous weaving in and out of headstones, the running up the hill and down again, and the stream of questions. This is the first time that Millie hasn't been entirely satisfied with easy answers, and, in her stage of incessant questioning, she struggled to understand the difference between body and soul, and why it was that people's heads weren't still alive even though the stones were called "headstones."
Ten minutes after we arrived home, I discovered Ignatz's stiff body and ran through my helpless answers all over again. Millie's too young to understand death, and I don't know how much I understand of it myself sometimes; I think part of her expects to see Ignatz running through the garden next spring, sprouted anew from the dirt in which John placed him. I am grateful that she's young enough to be resilient, but I'm much more glad that she's not yet faced a loss greater than that of a squeaking mouse. When that time does inevitably come, may she have the true hope that the one she's lost will rise again, sprouted anew from the ground of which God fashioned man.
With its latter place in the cycle of endings and beginnings, fall is the best of times for cemetery visits, and the victory of our Lord over Death and its sting seems that much more palpable.
Fall is also a good time to replace mice.
