9:30 a.m.

I’d probably still be sleeping, but Barney came bouncing onto the bed. “I think there’s a woodtick on the bedroom wall! Are you going to come and get it off?”

“No ... I’m not getting out of bed to catch a tick. You catch it.”

***

Jill and I were almost finished putting in the second flowerbed in front of the tombstones of our grandparents, when the cemetery maintenance man pulled up to the gate and informed us we weren’t supposed to be doing it. We finished the job, watered the wildflower seeds, hauled the utility knife, leftover edging, bag of peat, and spade, back to my van, and left. It’s done.

I’d like to have spent more time at the cemetery last night. Way back in the corner are the oldest graves, where our great and great-great grandparents are buried. I’d like to visit.

As I walked over to the bush around the perimeter to throw chunks of dug-up sod away, I remembered being in the cemetery as a child, when a crow flew up unexpectedly and I, terrified, hightailed it out of there, as if it was a forbidden and dangerous grounds inhabited by ghosts and god knows what else.

Now I find the cemetery a peaceful, comforting, safe place. I anticipate my ashes resting there one day, under a tombstone of their own.

I walked over a classmate’s grave as I left the cemetery, said “Hi Laurie.” She died when we were in Grade 3, of leukemia.

She’s not there, of course, and neither is anyone else whose name and birth and death dates are carved into the tombstones. But I almost wish they were; at the very least, I am comforted by being six feet away from their bones.

And how restful it is to drive through the open fields for miles and miles, on gravel roads. I am home, home at last! For the most part of the last 20 years, there’d be pre-nostalgia when I came for my short visits. I was only here for a time and would soon be leaving. Now, I know I am staying and there is a profound sense of being where I belong, and love for the endless beauty and richness of it. I breathe many deep sighs of contentment while gazing over the familiar landscape here.