When Grandma would walk with me, I saw another sort of foreshadowing of my own death as the wrinkles on her face showed in all their glory when she laughed at me and my goofiness. Daylight was decreasing, as was the time left in my life. Families were grouped together, making it seem as if that was the end of the family line. Some tombstones had the names of children who had lived only a few years, making me grateful for my own. It had only a few tombstones, from the nineteenth century, which, as a kid, I thought was ages past. But the small cemetery by Christie Lake sure brought it home. I never left those kind of cemeteries-after visiting my grandpas’ tombstones, for example-with a sense of my own death. Those are huge and set off from the rest of town, making them rather impersonal. This cemetery was different from the cemeteries I saw in Chicago. I moved from the middle blue of the lake, through the green of life (the woods), to the ethereal gold, gained through grave. Each walk came to represent my journey toward my own path’s end, my own demise. Our path ended at an old, small cemetery and, as the years passed, the path’s ending-always bringing me to the graveyard-became for me a working metaphor about life itself. The lake was surrounded by farms of golden wheat that in late summer would sway in the wind, and the landscape became concentric circles of blue, green, and gold. Besides swimming in the lake and playing cards, there wasn’t much to do, so Grandma and I would take long walks together. Sometimes my sisters and I were left there with our grandmother for the week. Each summer, my family visited my great aunt’s cottage on Christie Lake in southwest Michigan. Do you remember when you first realized that you would eventually die? I do.
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