A Visitor

Jesse came in for the weekend. It was good to spend some quality time with my brother. He flew in Friday morning and left Sunday evening. We managed to fill up that small chunk of time quite well.

We spent a fair amount of time watching le Tour. We also drove to Grinnell - the town my mother, aunt and uncle grew up in. We connected with an old friend of the family, visited the halls of the university in which my grandfather taught, the streets where my mom and her siblings played, and finally found my grandmother's grave in a cemetery on the side of a hill. I'd never visited a grave before. We had quite a search to find it and weren't sure at first we were looking in the right place. When Brian finally found her name on a tombstone and my brother and I walked over to look, I found the experience unexpectedly moving. I wondered how long it had been since someone stood in that spot and mourned her death. As I looked at her name carved on that stone, delineating the short years of her life, I wondered how my heart could stir for a woman who died over a decade before my birth. I thought of my mother, a young girl, standing in that same spot looking at that same stone and struggling with the new state of her reality.

I believe I don't want to be buried in a graveyard, but nonetheless it felt meaningful to make that little gesture - to sit on the side of a grass-covered hill overlooking a creek, take a moment to regret the loss of an acquaintance I never made, and feel thankful for whatever force lined up the variables to bring me that place.