Lots for Sale
“I’ve had to self-analyze my penchant for cemetery photos this week. Maybe there is a lot of death around us, or maybe the uncomplicated tracts of burial plots allow disoriented passers-by to, at once, feel safe. Spaces unencumbered by three-dimensional chess games, involving players, invested in outcomes. No, here in the well defined areas of tombstone placement, a traveler can feel undisturbed. No one questions who’s pulled off in a cemetery for motive, or feels obliged, as part of a responsible citizenry, to monitor. There is an implicit respect, if not for the dead, but those bumping along the pot-holed, checkerboard lanes of neglected, graveyard highways. Which is a misnomer, I guess, referring to said dirt highways. As if to think we could take a right, then a left, and go up to the stars without paying some kind of .. well.. death tax. Not to be morbid, for indeed I’m inclined to make a happier post. I really do love the living, even in this sawed off world. I feel heartened, today. As one cuts the cord at a birth, or detaches from a vicious perpetrator, timeless light is allowed to reenter and redefine everything. There’s no going back, as each loss will tell you. Add to that the cemetery association’s reassurance that there are “lots still available”. Not just plots - my bad! I really like this concept of lots. In fact, feeling grateful for my own lots in life, is what inspired me to take a drive, tonight, right about twilight, before the post office closed. Akin to a miracle, what you can’t think through caged up at home, will likely loosen up on wheels. Your life, often operating by pen light, will yet ride shotgun to a higher power with a little added gas! Past the established houses of small-minded people, past the ones who feign care, past the mobile encampments of giants who flee town periodically, to avoid closer scrutiny. Past the twinkling Christmas lights of those who might be Jesus, or know him, or be at peace, completely at odds with regular town folk. All are welcome under the same jurisdiction, as ludicrous as that may seem, and as poetic as it may actually be. And suddenly I feel the impact of having idled my truck for so long that I’ve migrated to the fringes of society. Become a critter at odds with friends who now pride themselves as enforcers of social goodness. Which I used to think was cool. So I watch, as if from across a great divide, one or more wild, mountain rivers pounding between us, clear and elemental. Our sad & empty history of infidelities, misunderstandings, & in fact total wrong-headedness, having completely missed what might have passed for our common humanity. Why the truck motor’s still running, wasting gas, and I’m warm inside the cab, hunched up next to the blower, heater on HI, keeping a low profile. Warding off rumors, to the best of my ability, which isn’t saying much, and the whispers, & funny valentines embellished by color and iconography, that end up: “she’s not really one of us”. Yup, not my first rodeo. Which is why I started to write tonight. To give thanks to the ones who are maybe “the meek” or maybe, the invisible lions of truth. The carpenters, the baby tenders, the ones who pick up food, to feed others. The ones who whittle bark off tender saplings, like beavers do, to outwit the winter. The huge, fluffy flakes, not so much in town, but in the higher hills, making a song all day. Up here, where its not much known outside of it, about the secrets of living.”