It is a Sunday morning after a night of thunderstorms.
I am picking up fieldstones on a cousin's 80 acres in Michigan's Thumb and putting them in my car. Some have to be pried from soggy earth, others rolled to the car and hoisted onto the sheet-covered back seat.
A warm wind blows over ankle-high corn. A bright sun shines in a blue sky. My brow is wet in the already muggy day. I stand for a moment, rocks in each hand, catching my breath and looking across newly planted fields.
I can see the orange brick house my great-great-grandparents built a quarter-mile away and the barn of another cousin across the road from the cemetery. This swath of farmland felt special to me decades before I knew my ancestors had settled it, cleared it, tended it and lost some of it during the Great Depression.
Thoughts come and go on the day after the 121st Annual Alumni Banquet at my old high school. Suddenly, I know this field trip is about more than gathering stones for flower beds in my Traverse City lawn.
It is a return to ancestral grounds in the wake of more funerals during the last two years than I can count. It is about my deep sense of connection to the earth. It is about the gratitude I feel for life, the human experience and the perpetual cycles of birth, death and regeneration.
I am collecting stones for the same reason I returned some of my German mother's ashes a few years ago to her "homeland," not her nation. It is about something primeval, something understood more by soul than mind.
I have reached an age where attending funerals is a common occurrence. My neighbor Tim Hoban's was the most recent. He died last month, less than two years after his wife Lise passed on. Before them Tim's mother, Mary, was my neighbor. I have lived by Hobans for about 20 years. An era in my life passes.
My car is 60 stones heavier, and it is time to go.
Hundreds of Memorial Day flags flap in the wind as I drive by the cemetery on the dirt road my great-grandfather built. I turn in and stop at the graves of my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. I thank them for life and memories.
I touch the small flag waving over my father's grave, remembering the faded one I removed while still in grade school and still have tucked away somewhere.
Life is perpetually impermanent. Even perennials pass on, though they leave seeds. Rocks compress sands of time. They remind.
Loraine Anderson can be reached at 933-1468 or landerson@record-eagle.com.
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