-photo by John M. Humphrey

Memoriam

Stones dot the rolling fields;
Gray and green broken up
by pastel splashes of plastic flowers and tattered flags.
Even at 12, I’d read the markers
and imagine the stories
that were buried there. This man
was a General in the Civil War.
He drank whiskey and smoked cigars and walked with a limp.
And Alice. She was a nurse from New York City who moved here to breathe the fresh air before she died.
My dad would be trimming and scraping, helping stone in its endless struggle against the grass. He always had a story as well.
“This was your grandfather,” he would say, “He tried to give
you his dog when you were about 4 years old. That was one of
the only times you met him.”
It was about the only time
my mother met him as well.
One other time she made my father go see him when my grandfather was dying. He wanted no part of it.
It was only as I got older that I realized … if my grandfather had given me that dog it would have been one thing more than he had ever given my father.

“Well that’s about it,” my father would say.
“Don’t step on the graves.”

I would zig and zag and hop to the car, fearful that I would disturb The General, or Alice, or the boy who
only made it to 8.

And the ghosts would follow us home.