Lozetta Doll
Just two years ago, in October, I was preparing to leave my retirement home of 20 years. Tom’s funeral had been on September 3rd and a few days later an offer came through on our house. Adding stress onto stress, I decided I had no choice but to sell, and readied myself for the move. I hated to leave, but the place was too much for me alone.
As I was going through some things in a shed behind Tom’s shop, I came across three pails filled with rocks. Our family collects rocks instead of souvenirs. We take them along when we move. Some, like the obsidian, came with us from Montana to Oregon 40 years ago. The petrified wood was from North Dakota. Many, especially the agates, were awaiting their turn in Tom’s rock tumbler. I stood there, looking down at those rocks when Tom’s words came into my head, “Why don’t you leave them with me?” and I liked the idea. A few days later, a group of us, friends and family, gathered at the cemetery with levels, rakes, and shovels. We brought in good top soil, put the rocks in a border all around the gravesite, and planted a drought-resistant wildflower seed mix. His tombstone has an engraved sketch of a man sitting in a boat, fishing pole in hand. Right next to Tom lies a fishing buddy, Earl Kemp, a friend and neighbor who died in 2017.
A few weeks earlier we had chosen the gravesite in the Lone Pine cemetery, about five miles from our home as the eagle flies. It is completely rural, surrounded by dry land farms, with a view of both Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams. There is no water on site; no grassy, mowed knolls; no regular caretaker. Rainfall comes seldom to the area, only about 22 inches in an average year. The community has a cleanup day every spring but it is mostly a solitary place. A few of the older graves are unmarked. The earliest marked grave there is for the infant twins of M. M. and L. J. Warner who were born and died on September 30, 1883. One section of the cemetery is devoted to the remains of Indians, moved there in 1957 before the water behind The Dalles Dam flooded their cemetery at Celilo Falls.
Some of my family and I spent a weekend in High Prairie at our friends’ house last October, not even a mile from our former home. It seemed familiar, but strange, like I no longer belonged there. Yet, familiar in that the nearly-full moon shone down on us every night and we heard the coyotes howling. The year had been exceptionally dry so the oak leaves were turning brown instead of orange.
On Saturday of that weekend, we gathered up a shovel, rake and leaf blower and went to the cemetery with our small work party. We pulled a few weeds, tidied up the rocks, and raked around the wildflowers.
We stopped there again on our way home on Sunday. A deer had left tracks on the freshly-raked soil. He would have liked that.
I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age.
—Lin Yutang
Beautiful!