Another Cloudy Afternoon At Raymond Carver's Grave

The thing I forgot to mention last time is that it is astonishingly beautiful there. The waves loud on the cobble beach below the bluff, the green grass, the trees; Canada barely visible to the north across the Strait on such a grey day. Ships pass by.

View West, Ocean View Cemetery, February 23, 2012 (Click for larger image.)

Another retired Santa Fe librarian houseguest, another teensy expedition down the street to Ocean View Cemetery. It belongs to the city; looks and feels like history, but still in use: a new grave here, a recent date there. It is so small and quiet, from here you can imagine that the town itself is still as small as it must have been in 1894. On neither visit was a single other (living) person in the cemetery, all very still except for the sound of the waves arriving off the Strait.

Raymond Carver, RIP (Click for larger image.)

There's a columbarium there, too, but I can't imagine why you'd want your ashes locked up in a cubbyhole instead of quietly and illegally strewn just at the edge of the grass, where a friend dumping out a little container of you could see along the shore to east and west, and hear the water... Right at the moment it is not clear where else I could want my ashes to be. Where they gotta be is another question entirely.