Cemeteries and Guru Ants

Over the weekend I did something that should have been done around Memorial Day. I packed a bucket up with garden gloves, a spade, scrub brush, plastic bags and a gallon of water and headed off to the cemetery to tend to my husband’s grave marker. If the sod around the stone isn’t edged once a year, it wouldn’t take long for the entire stone to be covered over with dirt and grass. Location, location, location---like buying a house, when you pick out a gravesite location matters. Don’t buy one in a low spot. Of course, we didn’t think of that when my husband and I picked out our site. It’s in the same row as plots our friends bought and that pleased our funny bones to be neighbors when we die. Don is there waiting all by himself. Well, not exactly. He grew up near the small town where his ashes are interred and he delivered newspapers to most of the houses, back in the days when newspapers were the kings in the media world. He knew a lot of the people buried in the cemetery. He also trimmed trees and cut the grass in the grave yard for an entire summer of restitution for a juvenile crime. Hint: Don’t move city-owned picnic tables into the river. Yup, the guys in our row at the cemetery will have much to talk about when they reunite.

It was a pleasant day, sunny but not too hot and I got the edging done without taxing myself. Last year I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep up the stone’s maintenance but this year I realized my recent strength training at the gym made the chore not only manageable but almost meditative. I was so in the zone of what I was doing that when I walked back to the car I was surprised to see another woman was working less than 50 feet away. I’ll have to go back another day to affix a Snoopy trinket to the corner of the stone. It was too wet to do it while I was there. But I don’t know why I keep that tradition going because by fall some little kid will have peeled the trinket off the stone. I use Crocs shoe charms and if you hear about an old woman mugging a little kid to get the Snoopy charm off his shoe it will be me, taking back was as taken from the cemetery. 

I picked Saturday to go to the cemetery because there was an art show going on in the community pavilion in town and I wanted to know if any of the artists knew of someone who teaches painting. At the sponsoring group’s table they took my email address and I was told one of their members does hold classes. (Fingers crossed.) After checking out all the artist’s work I walked across the street to a hot dog place that overlooks the town’s damn and garden park. With my lunch packed to go, I went out their back door and ten steps later I was connected to the nature trail. I found a bench in the shade about a block away where I could watch the swans and kayakers go by. The trail was busy---bikers of all descriptions, skateboarders, joggers, dog walkers, fly fishermen, and people pushing wheelchairs. I’d done my share of pushing a wheelchair and walking the dog on that trail but a bad tick season made me stop doing the latter and Don’s death, of course, ended the former. It wasn’t a sad day of memories although earlier when I turned into the cemetery I was swallowing hard the way you do when you think tears might spill. That brief moment made me wondered if that was the reason why I’d put off doing my spring chore until mid-summer. But it wasn’t. I just got too busy.

As I sat by the river a slight breeze carried the sweet scents of summer and I glanced down to the cement pad my bench was sitting on and I got side-tracked watching a black ant carrying off a shredded pickle longer than he was. It had fallen off my hot dog. A piece of shredded cheese was near-by. I picked it up and put it down in the path of another black ant but he just walked over it and before I knew it I was engrossed in the curious dietary preferences of ants. Pickles and bun bits, yes. Cheese and onion, no. I thought about giving them a few drops of my Coke but I’m pretty sure that would have been akin to yelling “THE KEG'S HERE!” in a college frat house. Without planning it, without consciously commanding myself to relax and live in the moment, to mediate myself to a place of peace, it happened anyway. I was both in and of world, a god to ants in the same way some higher power might be putting ‘pickles’ and ‘cheese’ in my path to see how I’ll react. They say the benefits of Mindfulness (living in the moment) are: It reduces brain clutter, brings better force in your life, lowers stress, helps you better understand your pain and connects you with the world around you. I get that. I got that tenfold on Saturday. After spending over three hours between the cemetery, the art show, lunch and playing mindfulness games with my guru ants, I went home and took a long, dead-to-the-world nap. ©

“In today’s rush, we all think too much — seek too much — want too much — and forget about the joy of just being.” ~Eckhart Tolle