Remembering

When I was young we lived next door to a church out in the country in Maryland and the cemetery there was a place to play on and around the graves, read the names, use the long raised ones as tables, collect ribbons from dried up bouquets that our mother ironed and later used on our Christmas packages; all behaviors hardly fitting the usual expected decorum. But it also began a long relationship with these places of burial that is comfortable and strangely comforting. We do die, we all know that. Playing among the dead somehow has made it a very real and not a terribly frightening status; admittedly I have not faced it "dead on" either.

So my tribute is two days early as I was in one of my favorite Seattle graveyards, up on Queen Ann Hill.