Out the kitchen window

 

At this time of year, the sun sets through the leaves and branches of a giant oak tree that lives on the lot south/west of us.  This just happens to be the view out the kitchen window that we get of that phenomenon in the autumn times, and can be quite a spectacle.  

Just mind the gap(s), because that sun will smite your eyeballs if it's not peeking picturesquely though the foliage.  So, no doing dishes around normal dinnertime if you want to preserve your peepers.

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As it happens, today is another beautiful day in the neighborhood, and because I got done with work a bit early, I decided to take a Walk With Wern.  Normally, this is something that the LOML does, but it was seriously too gorgeous to NOT do the WWW.  

Wern agreed.

We started with a bit of a ride around town, because I had some thought about exploring one of the small parks downtown (this one), but it's too close to where folks are going to do their early voting (VOTE!!!!) and parking wasn't great as a result.

I do love to see a crowd of folks doing their civic duty, but that is a tangent.

We wound up driving up to the town cemetery, which is nice and peaceful most of the time, as you can imagine.  I like cemeteries, and our town has a great one.  It's where I will be, or the corporeal remains of me will be, when my time comes to be stored conveniently for friends and family to come visit.  Naturally, we parked next to 'our' columbarium to wave hello at the Final Resting Place before Wern had a sniff-round of the place.

He sniffed the Barhams and the Sherrons and the Holdings and all the nearby graves of persons for whom roads are named in this town.  It's very historic, my future neighborhood.  And beautiful, with tall trees and gently sloping land around family plots that are well tended to.  There's an enormous pin oak that has dropped a ton of leaves that smelled quite lovely to the canine, and certain boxwoods that needed to be watered by him, so it was a busy time in the graveyard.  

Oddly busy, too, with visitors.  One fellow pulled up right as we did to visit someone in the columbarium area (there are several of them nestled in their own little neighborhood) and we had a quick chat because he called Wern beautiful and that deserves at least a couple of minutes of small talk.  He asked me who I'd lost that I was coming to visit, and in true awkward me form said 'oh, nobody yet, but that's where I'm going to be when the time comes' and did not EVEN ask him who he was there to visit, because I lose my mind in social situations and forget how being polite works.

Another visitor pulled up to the other side of the cemetery, and stood quietly near the final resting place of someone who I hope passed after a long, good life.  Just...stood.  I didn't get close enough to hear if he was talking to the dearly departed; it looked more like a personal communion, without the wine and baguette.

There were workers there too, out at the back, tending to the grounds, making sure things were tidy and safe and clean.  That makes me feel good about our future home, that it is maintained by both the town and people who have a connection to the ones who can no longer tend to themselves.

Once Wern's sniffer was full we of course came back home, wherein he has spent the last hour knocked out on the couch from the sheer thrill of the graveyard ramble.

I think we'll do it again tomorrow.

Tiff out.