A cold, gray sky, the color of winter, rose in a dark arch over my head. I looked up, seeing the steel-wool clouds pressing down, oppressive in their iron glory. The skeletons of trees loom, their broken fingers reaching plaintively for the sunlight they will not get, their toes digging deeply into the ground to draw the nutrients to fuel their hulking husks, until the season has passed. They are all here, and it is winter. And the straggling path, crunching sand beneath my feet, groveling gravel submitting to the granite presence of sovereign Winter, and the cold that it entails. It is all winter.

I’ve followed the path, all the way to its source, back to the heart it came from, to a little stone marker not more than three feet high, to a little stone marker that is all that is left of twenty one years. This path, and this oppressive day, has led me here…

Among the gray faces that stare eternally into oblivion, who tell the story of those that have gone before, those who have met their end. The gray faces stare endlessly, miming their stories for all to see, staring into the path strewn with old flowers. The markers of life, of death, lie here in this graveyard, where the gray faces stare. Here we find our history. And here we find our future.

Staring, looking at the gravestones, looking at the gravestone, staring… The flowers that are there, frozen in their splendor, cut at the apex of their life, but preserved always… The grass, that should be green, but has taken the shade of lead from the rest of the day… The flowers… If I wanted to, I could count them. It would be easy to tally up the two dozen white roses, the fifteen red roses, the three stems of violets, all bleached into moldering shades of greens and grays. And one sunflower, from a summer long forgotten. A summer that still burns bright in the yellows and vivid browns of the human memory.

It was summer then, and she had just celebrated her 16th birthday. That would mean that it was five years ago. I can still remember all the time we spent together. All the endless days at the beach, the sapphire blue of the sky in perfect contrast with turquoise glass of the sea. The warm golden sand beneath our feet, the soaring gulls circling over the water. Their cries, loud and raucous, still ring clear. The anger involved when a pelican used to swoop and steal the fish that the gulls were chasing. She used to love the pelicans…

Or the time we went camping in the forest, the August air so thick we had to drink it. How we used to go to the river, and fish for our meals. I used to catch the fish, she’d take them off the hooks and go prepare them. There is nothing to compare to pine-roasted fish. The smell of the smoke to replace the smell of the fish, and the smell of the trees around made our humble food into the greatest of delicacies. And the way you could look up through the trees, and see the millions of stars at night… We used to lie out beneath the huge towering green of the Redwoods, and stare at the stars for hours. We talked about everything, and about nothing, but we were there, together. I can remember all the shooting stars we’d see, and the grand wishes we used to make. I’ve never seen a shooting star without her there. I don’t know if they exist without her…

The gravestone seems warm to the touch. So warm in fact, that it finally induces me to get rid of the jacket I’ve been wanting to take of for some time now. Thinking about those lost summers always warms me a little. And who needs a jacket when you have memories?

02/04/2002

Posted on 02/04/2002
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