Got outta bed after a long night of bad dreaming.

Forecast called for rain. Looked like maybe a little pocket this morning before the skies open. Threw on a ballcap and sweats and drove myself to the cemetery. Parked in the usual spot. 

I love visiting on Sundays. It’s so genuinely, and evolvingly, beautiful. 

Quiet enough to hear the crows. 

So many deer — to make clear it’s a shared space. 

Enough hills of varying lengths and grade to afford options. 

Impossible to ignore the seasons.

Took a couple sips of water before locking up the car and easing into my route.

Which starts with a gentle downhill into a left turn with a short, steep climb that takes you up and around a corner. Elevates your heart rate — a good, early systems check to let you know what you might have in the tank — before gifting you a little downhill to catch your breath. Spits you into a roundabout that sometimes I’ll lap a few times for some easy distance before backwashing into a long straightway that takes me back to the crematorium — or as my daughter likes to call it, the “E-Z Bake” — near where my car’s parked.

I circle the parking area a couple times before heading up a nice, easy grade that drops you down to one of my favorite parts — a sloping hill of the cemetery that’s reserved for military veterans.  

On days when my tank’s full, I’ll loop here a few times before continuing on and finishing my first full lap somewhere around three miles. 

This morning … I paused, despite the rain on the way. Was only a couple miles into things.

The flags always get me. 

The hill’s persistent breeze tends to keep them waving.

If the flags weren’t there, I would just look beyond the gravestones to whatever’s beyond. 

So I’m grateful for the flags for reminding me to think of those buried below them.

And their sacrifices, both in the act and substance of their serving. To things bigger than themselves — whether troop, platoon, buddy, family, hometown, country.

Like the deer, the flags remind me that this is a shared space, and by that I mean the cemetery. And the world. 

The flags remind me to listen for what those who are no longer … might have to say to our Now.

To inform our Not Yet. 

I imagine some genuine characters are buried here. Imagine a lot of strong, colorful and varying perspectives represented. Imagine all made their share of mistakes. Imagine that they learned some things along the way that they tried to pass on. Probably saw some things differently at the end than they did at the beginning. Probably were buried with some messy regrets, just as we will be buried with ours.

This morning the leaves got me, too. 

Foregrounding things. 

A reminder that that this, too, is but a season. 

No more and no less. 

As ever.

The bare tree in the background, a reminder, too. 

That in our falling, we only fall so far from where we start. 

Pretty much the whole mystery of it all, right there.

Quiet enough to hear the crows. 

And long enough to hear them fading in the distance. 

After just a couple minutes, I took a deep breath and continued on.

Going as far as I could until the skies finally opened. 

Finished where I started, not far from the E-Z bake. 

Took note of the fact of that, too. 

Kept the windows down on my short drive back home. 

So I could smell the rain on the pavement.

And be reminded that the rain gets us all wet just the same.

By the time I got back home, I was hearing the words of Kurt Vonnegut.

Wondered if he, a veteran of the firebombing of Dresden, was spending this gray Sunday buried under a waving flag somewhere. 

How he pretty much summed up all of the above some sixty some years ago in a couple lines from Cat’s Cradle. 

“Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.” 

Clear as the crows.

Only took him 25 words. 

Took me 800 to try and say the same thing.  

Sometimes I take the scenic route.