How you do anything is how you do everything.
I feel a bit like Maude these days.
My two feet, one in front of the other, tiny and compressed in their worn running shoes, follow the path that leads around the cemetery.
I nod to the deer who keep watch.
There are many of them now. At least a dozen. Some standing, some laying down.
All with big deer ears and big doe eyes and watchful gaze over the moss covered gravestones and the newly dead.
It's the newly dead that I notice and that I count. The ones that make my heart stop for just a few seconds.
I ponder their once full lives, their last fleeting seconds, their still living families and I wonder, always, out loud...
"Was it the virus?"
This fresh mound of earth that was not here yesterday, now it is here today, shovels all akimbo, covered in a plastic blue tarp, a sharpied stake with a name.
"Did the virus do this to you?"
The deer remain vigilant, keeping guard, ears spread this way and that, always listening, eyes wide open and knowing.
There's an occasional Canadian goose honking its own sorrowful mourn, an off-key trumpet for us all, living and deceased.
Today, there were two. Just like my tiny feet. Mounds of blue.
I cheered for the living, cheered for LIFE, cheered for the grand adventure ahead.
The deer will guide their journey and will keep them company as they make it.
Comments