The Only Ones

I was a little afraid of dead things when I was child. Once, when I was telling my father how scary it would be to live next to a cemetery, he said in that flat voice he usually reserved for answering stupid questions, "Why? THOSE are the only people on the earth who won't hurt you." Along the route to Bram's school, there are two cemeteries: on the west and east on the way in, and on the east and west on the way home. I notice these cemeteries not because there is a house right up against one of them or because I am feeling miserable or hollow (though I often am), but because what I see first are the flowers that have blown off the graves. For some reason, it really bothers me to see them there, ripped from the resting places of somebody's loved ones and lying like so much trash in the ditch and along the roadside. These days it's mostly red poinsettias or blue things or some kind of fluffy yellow spidery-looking flower I don't recognize. I would like to stop and to put them all back, but of course I can't. And that bothers me more than it should. I am sorry for the living who brought the flowers to the cemetery and how they must have felt about leaving first someone they loved and then the flowers and for the oblivious dead who now thanks to the wind, appear to lie there unmissed and ungrieved. But then, THEY are the only ones on earth who. . . .