It’s 38, raining, and there’s a hurricane in the Gulf. Seems pretty normal for October. In the old days, this weather would have made me positively giddy for opening day, deer or duck. But somewhere along the way my desire to put meat on the table disappeared, and I settled for the super market. Our deer population exploded, and the ducks and geese started staying in Arkansas. No way really to correlate the two, but I’ve seen people take credit for weirder coincidences.

Anyway, I’m a home body now and I do my best to stay out of the weather unless it is absolutely necessary to be out in it, which it was yesterday. Got my oil changed, bought a loaf of bread at the store, and walked among the headstones at the cemetery. It was a gray day, but a good day for a walk and I know where all the relatives are buried. So, I thought I’d go say hello. My tour of the underworld ended with a stop at my wife’s marker, which is a little metal embossed affair, flanked by two plastic urns filled with silk sunflowers. Good for now. Better is coming.

On my tour, I saw several of the metal markers, similar to my wife’s, around the cemetery and they’d obviously had been there for a while which made me wonder if better stones were ever coming and who were the souls buried there? I saw one or two markers that appeared to be handmade. That’s some nice initiative. I guess you could say I’m getting to know the neighbors lying there in this field of stories. I think they’d appreciate the effort. After all, they are crying out to be remembered, otherwise why go to all the trouble?