Cemetery, green with life, moss on headstones weeping for the long past. The reddish brown moss is the only thing left that remembers the bones under the carved rocks. A culvert runs through the cemetery, three feet deep and five feet wide, rusty metal bars hold it open; little water passes through but there's always a constant stream, enough to carve out a jagged gash along the bottom where the grackles, mockingbirds, starlings, cardinals and mourning doves come for a beak full of water under the shade of the weary trees.Cedar, oak, pecan trees stand like soldiers over the battlefield, the dead all around them at their feet. They invite the breeze and she comes and they whistle their approval as the birds sing endlessly.
The first names I saw were GLASSCOCK and BELCHER. Old names, changed out of embarrassment, perhaps, or maybe these were the people who never married, never had children, didn't leave a bit of themselves behind for future generations.
The grackle has a pretty song, clucks and machinery, flutters of noise, happy sounds, specks of laughter.
The dead in this cemetery are long gone, most of them, I would imagine, particularly the ones from two or three centuries ago, especially the babies who lived a day or two, a month at the most, their little stones weathered and rounded, nothing but their name and a couple of dates to show for themselves, nothing more to say for their lives. LITTLE CHARLES LUCK. Or Little Luck, as he might be called. Why is it sadder when an infant dies? I think it's sadder when a child of five or six, or anywhere under twenty or thirty dies, that's really sad. Sad for the people who loved him. Still do love him.
Off in the distance I hear children playing and the very familiar sound of the ice cream truck coming closer, the electronically plinked out classical song coming from the speaker on top is likely making that composer turn over in his grave again and again and again and again, plink-plink-plink.
All around me are busy streets, an interstate heavy with traffic here at the rush hour evening time. But there is peacefulness here in this grand old cemetery. Iron fences rusting and falling apart add to the mystery, add to the beauty. Dried wildflowers gone to seed in an unmown patch dotted with the low to the ground rounded headstones of the Miller clan.
Death is beautiful.
