Our Graveyard

It’s near the end of one of the two roads that make up a tiny little town in western maine. A little grave yard with maybe fifty gravestones in it. Ten or so have my last name on them. I only know the person under one of those gravestones, my grandmother who I barely remember, just the idea of a smile, and a thought of her arthritic hands. My dad would always stop on the way home to look at that stone, a way to ease out the dust of grief. My grandfather would visit sometimes too, take four of his sons and walk among the stones, tell a story of the many grave stones he knew. The uncle of his shot in world war two, who had survived because of a bible or a tin of tabaco infront of his heart and then died of old age.

But next to my grandmother there is a space missing a stone, where two slabs of dirt have been placed back on the ground, and rain has hidden the lines. Under that there is a container that holds a box of my father’s ashes, a folded paper of instructions, and a bottle of glue. We haven’t found a headstone yet, eventually we will, a natural stone from the river that the road follows. Dad would like that we hope. And on it my parents names will be put, and then when my mother dies we will pull back those two chunks of dirt and pull out the paper and the glue. And then as we were told on the day we buried our father, us children will bury our parents, gluing the container closed and shoving it back in the ground. The uncles that buried it the first time will probably be dead by then, so we’ll shovel the dirt ourselves. The glue and the directions we’ll throw away, eager to be rid of them. Then when we walk the graveyard we’ll see three people we knew, one nearly forgoten, two filled with aching memories, and many more, the stories of which we’ll have forgotten. And we’ll stop when we’re leaving, maybe trailing our own kids behind, but probably we’ll be alone, alone and letting their stories drift away in the dust of grief that we let looses from our hearts, born by the soft wind filled with black flies that we used to walk through without caring.