The Octave of All Souls

I love graveyards.

I like them so much that I wrote my senior thesis about graveyards and I never got tired of it.

I love their ancient peace, the papable sense of waiting and resting, the feeling I get of stepping outside of time into an oasis of wonderful somberness.

When I once spent a summer with my relatives in a New England city, I felt mostly very alone. I would go to this ancient, breathtakingly beautiful graveyard and just sit in a patch of shade, or explore, walking slowly so as not to disturb anyone. I even found a gravestone that I wanted mine to look exactly like. :) (Needless to say, my husband, thinks this is dreadfully morbid!)

My favorite graveyard is the one in my little home town. It is high on a hill, above the town with beautiful old trees and civil war soldiers. (Those are my requirements for a good cemetary!) I used to take Turtle there last year in the autumn. Eight months pregnant with Rosebud, I would find a low stone wall and just sit and soak up the sun and the peace and breathe little disjointed prayers. Turtle would collect acorns and make lines with them, or play in the piles of leaves mounded up by the graveyard care-takers. We spent lovely, peaceful autumn mornings there.

I've been wanting to find a graveyard here in the city for months. And now that the Month of the Holy Souls is here and my husband has helped me, and I finally have! We have made two visits this week and "said prhay-errs" and sung "All-eh-oo-la." It makes me so happy to go there and I am grateful for this beautiful month in which so much grace is given for the Souls.