Promise of Love Is Hard to Ignore
Stone Angel
I had a good writing day, by which I mean 1000 words after breakfast (and 400 more this evening), taking me over 100,000 words for this draft. I’m happy with that. It meant that, after heaping a load of ingredients into a slow cooker, I was free to take a decent walk this afternoon. I ended up in one of the local cemeteries. It’s one I used to take our eldest round when she was still in her buggy. She slept for most of those trips, but it was a peaceful place to go for a walk, and still is.
I noticed that many of the modern gravestones were more demonstrative than the earlier ones, several having photos of the deceased inset into the stone. One grave had a memorial to the deceased from his ‘friends in East Belfast’, declaring He sleeps with his comrades now ; the neighbouring grave had three statues of the BVM. I don’t mean to mock; navigating our relationship with our ancestors has been at the heart of human society since it began.
The affecting graves aren’t the gaudily decorated ones, they’re the simple ones for infants or children, or those where the deceased is described as ‘only child of…’ They’re the ones where you empathise with the pain of the grieving, while the deceased are ushered through eternity by squirrels and magpies and the wind sloughing through the trees.
Cemeteries are for the living, of course; the dead don’t care.
***
I know I need to write up some more 1970 music posts. The next three are likely to involve some combination of If, Dr Strangely Strange, Mott The Hoople and The Byrds. I was also chatting with a friend about keeping something going through 2021/1971 too. We’ll see.
***
Music: My favourite Crowded House song.
Recent Comments