Beauty Without Rival

Alice hides like a pebble underfoot, not broken clean from her moorings. Snapped off wrong, spider-webbed and shattered, this little lost daughter of George and Annie McKay. I can't say how old she was or when she died, but a stone this small is usually a child under 5, and the design suggests the 1880s. These are tiny tales that someone trips over, easily unnoticed when the grass grows wild and high. Still, it's a beauty without rival – to swallow a body, then swallow the stone that stands atop it. The earth always works to encompass all that touches it, to reach wide and wrap around anything inclined to resist. Little bare-footed rushes through the graves gone before, and I come back with big steps wet through my shoes. This cold start to summer has a heavy heart about it, and it picks me up from where I'm sunken in the mud.

 

July 3, 2021

McKay Cemetery

McKay Section, Nova Scotia

 

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