51

I was momentarily saddened as I walked around the cemetery just outside the city walls of medieval Alcudia to see a couple of graves marked this way, just with numbers.  The nameless dead—somebody loved, surely, before forgetting and oblivion set in, before all those who kept the name in their hearts were, in turn, no longer there to remember.

Against the back wall overlooking the Mallorcan valley I also saw stacks of headstones waiting for their inscriptions.  A kind of eerie hovering of death, much like the Kite we saw this morning on the way to work, circling the grassy hill, waiting for prey.

But there is the memory of love, there, all around, and in the end I’m not saddened by cemeteries.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, 51