For Now, There is Wine

Some people have suggested that this blog tends toward an air of melancholy. It probably won't help,then, that this post concerns burial grounds. These images were made over the Christmas holidays when my husband and I were on one of our daily cemetery walks. Much of my family now rests there, and thus it has become a typical gathering point, incidental to our holiday time down south.

It is a beautiful cemetery, in fact, and my mother, who is mercifully still among the living, resides nearby and takes her evening constitutionals there. (I use the word 'constitutional' to refer to the most genteel of southern promenades, this being a cemetery in Georgia)

For me, these grounds hold the forgotten moments and unsaid words of people I once knew. Language is essential to life, so now that there are no more words, only the silence of death, it is much like simply not knowing someone anymore - we can no longer communicate. The novel has been read and the writer has stopped writing. When I visit the graves of my father and my grandparents, I can't help but think of all the pages that might have been torn out or maybe never written; added at the last minute or simply misread or misplaced. It is a peculiar feeling. All of the little tombstones are the periods at the end of a single final sentence, black and white and permanent.

If only a comforting hand on the shoulder in the gap of someone's absence, a certain wine, well loved, may remind of us the pleasures of life; art, beauty, enjoying the physical as well as the cerebral.

I remember sipping glass after glass of Montepulciano with my mother, as we talked late into the night.

The table wine enjoyed over a long dinner and big plans.

One day I will have nothing more to say; for now, there is the elixir of life and language; there is wine.