It was a bright, sunny day in the neighborhood when I got up
and I had places to go and things to do including going to the cemetery to do
some “housekeeping” around my husband’s gravestone before the Memorial Day weekend
kicked into high gear. But first I needed to drop off my recycling at the
transfer station what’s located along the way. I’ve been on a
militant mission to recycle as much one-time use plastic, glass and metal as
humanly possible. My recycling “come to Jesus” moment came after I posted the
video back in April of a sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck all the way up
inside his nose. I’ve always recycled newspapers, cardboard and pop cans but I
didn’t think I was generating enough kitchen and household recyclables to make a
difference. Boy, was I wrong. Before, I was going to the transfer station every 8-9 weeks but now I’ll probably need to go every 2-3 weeks and I’ve reduced the
trash that goes out to the street for Monday pickup so much that it looks
absolutely ridiculous in a tote big enough to hold 332.5 pounds. I’ve called
around looking for a trash pickup service that offers smaller containers or
once a month, rather than weekly pickups but they all seem to be using the same
play book.
The cemetery was a busy place. Mowers and guys with weed
whackers were working on the far side of the rolling, tree studded place and
Boy Scouts were making their way down the rows of stones, looking for graves to
put fresh American flags on. After I parked off to the side, careful not to encroach
on any gravesites, I grabbed my long-handled shovel, a jug of water, scrub
brush, plastic bag and garden gloves and I was surprised to see the tombstone
looked better than it usually does when I do the spring the cleanup. Usually sod
is attempting to take it over and the engraving in the marble is filled up with
dirt. Others like me were parked here and there and as we worked the bees were
buzzing, the birds were singing and the flowers were holding their faces up to
the sun. A perfect day to be anywhere but where I was.
As I dug out the sod around the stone I thought about what I
wrote in my blog last year---I had looked it up the night before. “This year,” it
read, “is my fifth Memorial Day since Don’s passing and I could write exactly
what I wrote last year: ‘I went to the cemetery on Saturday and had a talk with
Don. I told him that I think of him often and that I’m doing okay even though
he took a piece of me with him when he left.’” This weekend, my sixth Memorial
Day of grooming his gravestone we didn’t seem to be on speaking terms and that
may be because I had a half of jug of water left and I got side-tracked cleaning
up a near-by grave of a veteran of the Korean War that looked pitiful and
abandoned. I almost cleaned it along with Don’s last year but decided not to
because I had just read another widow’s blog who had gone ballistic when she
went to the cemetery to clean her husband’s grave and found it had already been
done. She suspected his first wife did it and she was going to have
a showdown over it. Dead and fighting over who gets to clean up after the guy!
He must have been quite the prize. Anyway, I’m thinking if Don’s Korean War vet
neighbor in the cemetery has a living widow around, I could take her down in a
fist fight.
On the way home from the cemetery I got caught in a road construction maze. The street I usually go home on had
been closed off permanently and the traffic light that used to be at that intersection
was moved 200 feet down the road, at the exit ramp coming from the expressway.
It’s not like we didn’t have a month of warnings. We did, but old habits are
hard to break and thank goodness I didn’t make a left onto the exit ramp. (Someone's going to do it!) Turning around in the carpool lot so I could head back in the other direction, I found the brand new by-pass road that eventually connected to the road I needed. But on
that road I ran into road block and had to turn around. AGAIN! I didn’t think I’d
ever find my way home and I was running out of options. I ended up going way far
out of my way but all’s well that ends well because that road took me to Starbucks and my Chevy Trax is programed to turn into their driveway.
As I jotted down notes for this blog entry I was sitting in their
coffee shop, using the stainless steel straw I now carry in my purse---that’s
how serious I am about doing my part to reduce was goes into the landfills and
oceans. It was my first “granda Teavana shaken pineapple white ice tea lemonade
sweeten infusion” of the season. They don’t tell you this, but ordering drinks
at Starbucks is a senility test. If you get any one of those words out of order
you have to start all over again. ©
