Place Entry #8: Picnic Party

Today will not be the last time I walk through this cemetery with my notebook and pencil. But this will be my last blog for a little while. It is finally warm. It is still gray. I think that the gray quality of Pittsburgh may be inescapable, a result from all the years that fires charged steel under these hills.

The cemetery always coaxes me into thinking about separation. Death is separation, a removal from everything established. A removal from love. There is a heaviness that comes over my chest, gray like the sky, when I see the tombstones of married couples laid in the ground next to each other. I notice the dates that they past. I think about the time in-between passings. Think about the pain that must have survived in the years following their separation.

But today, I come across two markers that do not inspire grieving over separation. About a half a mile into the cemetery lie the stones and bodies of Thomas and Maria Messler. They rest under a canopy, a tree that elbows over them. It shades them together in intimacy under the tree and away from the world.

I think about their first date. It could have been over lunch and under a tree like this. A picnic— with a country-patterned blanket— a woven basket borrowed from Thom’s mother— maybe they drank some orange juice with a splash of vodka in the afternoon.  I imagine there picnic-date. It is April; the sun is high but not aggressive. It gives way to a cool spring breeze that sifts through the tall grass in the field, and respects the privacy of the pair under the shade of the tree.

Every few minutes Maira’s hips roll over onto something hard and pointy under the checkered blanket. Her, “Ouch!” is playful and followed by a laugh. It is a good catalyst for touch, and Thom asks if she wants him to, “kiss it and make it better?” She does, and he kisses her hip covered in a sundress.

Black ants fight to get up the walls of the basket. They fling them off one at a time, and marvel at how they keep moving after they are fired from their fingers. They built a relationship through their eyes, dogging one another’s look between short kisses. They fall for each other in a dialogue of smiles, and the sharp snapping sounds from the bitten skins of apples. I imagine them kissing with their mouths full. I think people in love do that, I know I would.

Today, I smile. I slowly back away, not wanting to be a disturbance, leaving the together to their picnic and death—under the tree.