On my walk today I noticed…
I noticed how cold it is, and
how dark, for two
in the afternoon.
I saw leaves trying to
mulch down into the
unreceptive tarmac.
I felt my fingers freeze.
It was a short walk at the end of a long week.
There were other things I noticed. I passed the Methodist church, and walked into the car park to stand and look up at the small stained-glass window. I could make no sense of it. I walked away.
As I passed through the cemetery I noticed the rustling of a single dried leaf wind-blown along the hard path, and watched the denuded birch branches black against a deep grey sky.
I felt my customary impatience as my camera re-set itself to unwanted hybrids and refused
to be returned to a simpler mode. One day, I fear, I may actually throw my beloved instrument against some innocent tree. Or into a water trough. And regret it forever. I noticed a water trough by the tap…don’t recall seeing that before. It’s been a wet autumn but perhaps lessons have been learned from the long dry summer that preceded it.
The notices are up warning against “Christmas Decorations on Graves”. They try to find kind ways of saying: please don’t. And nobody listens. I don’t take sides. We don’t do graves and headstones in my part of the family, but part of me understands those who want to put tinsel around their last reminder of a loved one, who want to decorate a tiny tree with lights and hang tat in the birch branches. Only part of me…but still.
The other part of me thinks not of the dead, but the living, of the creatures who live in the cemetery. The deer, and foxes, the jays and magpies and ravens, the squirrels. And I would not want the living to choke on the memory of the dead.
I walk the cemetery often. It’s a cut through and so I see the opening of old graves to add new occupants. I see the out-of-season flowers that soon wilt forgotten. I see the lovingly tended stones and replenished vases. And I see the extravagant funereal displays that are left to rot into desperate
petals and twisted wire and no-one visiting again.
I notice small things. Single flowers. Toys. The stones that were lovingly carved with space left for a loved one to join in that last sleeping space, who never did. It seems sad, except that it must mean they found love again in the living world, and happiness.
I notice that there are fewer new graves now, than there were a couple of years ago. Some days I walk through now and see no new turned soil. Some days I see no mourners.
I often walk through the graveyard and think only "how come I do this now without a thought, but when he was alive I would not have dreamed of taking this short-cut". That genuinely puzzles me...when I came visiting the house that is now my home, I never cut through. Didn't even realise I could, and I wonder why.
I often walk through the graveyard with my mind on other stuff paying no more attention than I would to a city street, or a familiar suburban pathway.
But it is my nearest patch of wildness, for all the people buried beneath its surface, and for all the stones to ‘eternal memory’ and ostentatious remembrance and tender thoughts that won’t outlast a decade or two, it is a place of grass and trees and weeds. It is a place where the jay birds glide, and the squirrels frolic. A place of oaks and beech and birch and lime. A place where the earth reclaims her own.
It is a place where I can feel the wind and the cold, where I can see Earth saying welcome to those whom we have bid farewell. Ivy and lichen stealthily work their magic. Subterranean shifts twist the ground and reach up unseen fingers to draw down forgotten memories.
Today was a dark cold afternoon. I’d left both lights and heating on at home.
And then in the lane, beyond the gates, in the hedgerow I spotted star-white flowers. It is December. It is cold and dark. And I have been feeling sad all week.
And in the hedgerow there are flowers.
