A sunny day

Today was a little busy, a little too busy to really let the reality of where I am these nine months later sort itself out. But I did make it to the cemetery. This fall, when it hasn't been rainy, has been brilliant around here. You can still see a blindingly yellow tree here and there, or a fiery orange one.

The colors are much more sedate by the baby section, though. I don't know whether it is by design or accident, but most of the color you can see from there is the subtle mix of all those shades of brown and those very few shades of green and yellow that comprise the nondescript background of fall foliage, the stuff you normally don't photograph.

The section itself used to be surrounded by these bushes that looked spiky and naked, and prickly appropriate when we first saw them on a brilliant and windy day in early February, and then blosomed, not green but dark red, in the spring.

Some of these stoic guardians either dried or froze out, and so they have been removed, along with their close neighbors. In their place-- nothing so far, but the ground looks like it had been tended to. A's spot used to be right by where the bushes rounded a turn, so it looked very enclosed. And now you can see that the ground to the right slopes downwards. I am not used to it yet. I don't know whether I think it's airier or too exposed now. I wonder whether I will miss the enclosure when the grass reclaims the slope. How fucked up is it, by the way, that I noted as a plus of the new arrangement that now there seems to be room right next to A, should we ever need it?

Only about a third of the wall of bushes remains. The red bushes are my landmark-- they are how I know I found our section. I like this navigation technique much better than looking at the section names and numbers.

The bushes bear these funny red berries, but only in small clusters and only in a few select spots. Always on bare twigs. What do you think-- blood or tears?



As I was making my way out, I spotted this tree. I was going to say "spied" but really there was no missing it. It looked even brighter than the camera was able to capture, I think-- piercing brilliant wonder.

I don't know why I wanted to go by myself today when I knew that JD and I are going together tomorrow. I don't know why I wanted to bring the camera, or why I took all these pictures. They really are a very poor substitute for those first pictures of a baby playing in the autumn leaves, aren't they?