Cemetery Gates (bp coyle)

On days when it is not too cold or wet, she comes to the graveyard during lunch hour and sits on the bench beneath the old beech tree.

She is cute, in a quirky kind of way.

It took a while to get her to talk to me. I began by nodding a polite hello each time I walked by. A few days of that and then I actually said the word aloud. She shyly replied.

I extended our conversations by a word at a time.

‘Nice day.’

‘Lovely breeze out.’

‘Rain stopped at last.’

One hot summer afternoon I mopped my brow and asked if she would mind if I sat down beside her. The heat was exhausting.

Slowly, awkwardly, we began to chat.  We both like the Romantic poets, the paintings of Turner, the music of Bach.

When the church bell indicates that it is a quarter to two, she rises to leave.  We walk together to the gates and go our separate ways.

The moment she is gone I begin to count the down seconds until she returns.

She is such a wonderful person, I wish I had met her when I was still alive.

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