A little mystery

The in-between house is diagonally across the (very busy) street from the large, old cemetery. The historic part with the pre-statehood graves and such is on the far side of the cemetery from here. It is the relatively newer section near us that I walk the dog along every morning. It is bordered by a stone wall, and after we wander up the alley between the backyards, greeting the friendly dogs behind their fences, hurrying past the unfriendly ones, and visiting with the cats who have figured out that my dog is a pushover, we walk the sidewalk along the cemetery wall back toward the busy road and the house.

Sometime during the last year, I noticed for first time that there was a small bouquet of flowers left on the wall of the cemetery just outside one of the side entrances. It didn't really register to me then, not until a couple months later when another one appeared. The first one was a mixed bouquet, like you would find at the grocery store, still in its cellophane sleeve. The second one was yellow roses. Then a few months after that, some sort of lily.

This past Monday morning around 5:30 I found the next bouquet, pink roses. They had been left not on the wall, but deliberately placed in the middle of the driveway of the side entrance to the cemetery. Some drivers take a shortcut through the cemetery, and the bouquet had been run over at least once, even though it hadn't been there long. The flowers were still fresh, or as fresh as they can be after being run over. So I did what others probably had done before - I picked the bouquet up and put it on the corner of the wall by the entrance. I guess I was the first jogger or dog walker to notice them this time. Eventually the groundskeepers will pick them up and throw them away.