Reflections from a mountain cemetary

      Over yonder … just me, just sitting on the stone bench within the old cemetery’s iron fencing. Around me hatched shades of green speak of desultory human attention, blessedly absent from the surrounding dry grass. But green or dry, these wild weeds are congenial to my spirit.

      Just me, still above the hardscrabble, if ever more tenuously. Me, quietly nursing a new sharp pain at the juncture of left femur and pelvis, nevertheless content to just sit through these last final chapters. Just sitting, nearly as still as the old regularly clumped bones of my future neighbors, below.

      If cemeteries don’t encourage reflection, no settings will. And this one fairly does the work for you, itself just sitting at 10,000 feet in an undulating valley below the rocky outcrop that supports my home.

      I say “home” despite all the natural loveliness and real love labors that have gone into our primary residence down below, where the Great American Plain, fanning eastward, has staked out an uncontested claim. Up here—way up here!—in a ruin of a Colorado