Cussing at the Cemetary

While in Brady this weekend I stopped by Becky's grave and took her some new flowers. I try to do this each time I'm in the area. Some times I stay and sit a while. Some times I talk to her. This weekend I just cleaned up around her site and swapped out flowers. I wasn't there very long and there wouldn't be much to say, well, except for the cussing.

It was a beautiful day and the cemetery was packed. There were no less than fifteen cars sprinkled throughout the area. A family in their Easter best was just a few grave sites over from Becky's resting place. They presented the perfect scene for a movie; two parents (opposite sex), two children - a boy and a girl, all dressed up. They were quite and polite. Respectful.

I reached down to pull out the old flowers and came away with several stickers stuck into my hand. They were hard, dried out stickers just like the ones in the photo. When I was a child, mom use to call them devil heads. In un-landscaped areas of Texas they are very prevalent. As a child, our punishment often included spending so many minutes or hours pulling up devil head stickers from our lot. Needless to say, I'm not fond of them.

They didn't appear to be growing around Becky's headstone, but there were weeks overtaking the area so after removing the faded flowers I reached down to pull up some weeds and drew back a hand covered in more stickers. "Shit!" Wising up, I pulled out my small knife and used it to ply up the weeds, cussing the entire time. I ended up with seven stickers and one cactus spine - it was hiding under the weeds too.

I could almost feel Becky's presence as I dug up the weeds; laughing in the background. "Bitch!" She would have got the biggest kick out of me digging through stickers.

Perhaps it was that moment of recall, that feeling of closeness, that made this weekends brief visit to her grave more painful than the last three of four. Leaving me with a slight smile and tears in my eyes.