The freeze they needed came as it almost always did each year, a few days after Thanksgiving. It held, and on Tuesday they butchered hogs at Beulah Land and at Oaks, and on smaller farms nearby sharing the same weather. So, it was well into the second week of December before Sarah and Edna were given their mild day to drive into Highboro to the cemetery. Edna used her buggy for the trip. She remembered, and told Sarah, that it was her turn. She drove over and had dinner with Sarah before they set out, and they had close to three hours of daylight to work together.

Edna was a helpful teacher and guide. First, she explained the layout of the cemetery, leading the younger woman about as comfortably as if she were showing the rooms and furnishings of a house. Sarah had been there often before, but she had never noticed very much or thought about it. As they walked, Edna talked, and the cemetery became something like the family tree of the town and county. Although most of the country people buried their dead in country church yards, families like the Davises and Kendricks were buried here, so that there was a continuity that would have been otherwise lacking.

Edna did not know it all by any means, and some of the details she offered were only guesses, and she said so, but the longer Sarah listened and connected this name with that, without trying to hold and remember it all, she got a sense of lives lived and remembered—at least into this generation. A hundred years from now, she thought, others might stroll here and read, Sarah, wife of Leon, born—. And the thought was not morbid. Nothing of the afternoon was. It was a day in which she learned to think of past and future equally as “family.”

The two women raked and trimmed and smoothed, sometimes talking, sometimes not, and as she worked, Sarah began to understand and share the particular satisfaction she knew Edna found in the work.

The middle of the afternoon Edna looked up and saw with consternation Trudy and the four children approaching. The children ran ahead to her, delighted at her obvious surprise. Trudy followed, looking about her curiously. Sarah was working in the Kendrick plot, and did not come over, although she looked up and smiled and waved.

“We surprised you, didn’t we, Grandma?” Annabel said.

“You certainly did.” Edna turned her face and voice from the child to Trudy. “What are you all doing here?”

Trudy laughed. “I must say that isn’t much of a welcome—”

“Nor meant to be,” Edna said. “You children!” she called to the young ones who had darted away. “Behave yourselves!—and don’t you run across anybody’s grave, or I’ll skin you!” She addressed herself to Trudy again. “You didn’t say you planned on coming to town today.”