Not quite two weeks ago, Melissa and I met up at a cemetery to look at the headstones and take pictures and chat and stuff. The weather was beautiful, and it’s great to wander among the graves with someone who gets the attraction. It had been way too long since we last got together; I hope it isn’t way too long before we can do it again.

This particular cemetery is right across the street from the first apartment Mr. Karen and I chose together (not the first place we lived together, though—I moved into his bachelor apartment after we got married and we stayed there for a couple few years). He and I walked through the cemetery a few times when we lived close, reading some of the stones and wondering about the people buried there, but this was long before digital cameras made it easy and cheap to take lots of pictures so I didn’t have any images to flip through to refresh my memory before going back. Nonetheless, it wasn’t long before I found the headstone I remembered best from those earlier rambles: a marker for three children from the same family, all of whom died within a few weeks of each other. In the pre-Google days, it wasn’t so easy to find out more about the people under the stones so all we did was speculate about what might have happened. Now, though, it took just a bit of typing and clicking to find out that these children died of diphtheria. Poor things. I hadn’t remembered that the father of those children had already buried three wives by the time these children died; those women are on another stone nearby. I can’t even imagine.