No bench was placed where one could take in the town street scene. The ballpark was empty, where a bench might have been found; I didn’t look. Anyway, rain was in the wings. But a block off the main road there was a bench on the hill in the cemetary and I decided to rest there before biking home.

Vapour, like a cloud, arrived and whispered around my ears. I pulled up my hood. rows of graves sloped neatly in the directions away from me, their stones as different from one another as the people whose remains they marked. A few great trees met at treetop level to shelter us.

In time, I stood and strolled slowly between the rows, reading some names I knew: good, hard-working farmers with their families, whose living had come from their labours in these fields around, resting in peace; a much-admired storekeeper; loved ones ‘Together Forever’, infants, children. Sharp new monuments in company with the aged and crumbling.

While we live, we share the air, the water, the earth with generations who have gone before and those who will come after. I took a deep breath of the moist air spiced with early autumn and was comfortable under trees, under hood, in the not-quite rain.