From Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, an aspect of our local life that I also look upon from outside:
…she took the bag of clothes and walked up to the cemetery. There was the grave of the John Ames who died as a boy, with a sister Martha on one side and a sister Margaret on the other. She had never really though about the way the dead would gather at the edge of a town, all their names spelled out so you’d know whose they were for as long as that family lived in that place. And there was the Reverend John Ames, who would have been the preacher’s father, with his wife beside him. It must be strange to know your whole life where you will be buried. To see these stones with your own name on them. Someday the old man would lie down beside his wife. And there she would be, after so many years, waiting in the sunlight, all covered in roses.
Lila, Marilynne Robinson, Virago, 2014, pp 40-41.
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