The man with no name.

I loved playing in the family plot.  My middle sister and I had some great games sliding down the sloping moss-encrusted tombstone of my great-grandfather and fitting together the broken pieces of my great-grandmothers cross.  Sitting astride my grandfathers headstone, I remember gleefully saying to my sister   "I'm riding on his head".  We were quite an irreverent bunch of children.

There happened to be one grave where there was no inscription at all, just a small crumbling cement rectangle to demarcate the area. The story went that one day, a very sick wanderer landed up at the farm, and having succumbed to his illness, was buried there.  No one was any the wiser as to who he was, where he had come from or what his story had been.  It was a sad little grave and always caused me to feel a pang of regret on his behalf.

Both my great-grandparents John and Isabella, as well as my grandfather and great uncle and in time to come Mr. and Mrs. B from next door were buried there, and of course the man with no name.  Not a very big plot, but quite significant.  The farm derived it's name "Belladale" from my great-grandmother, who had come out from Scotland some years before.

My grandfather had beautiful little white stones all over his grave and my sister and I would collect them and take them home to use in whatever we happened to be constructing at the time.  Usually we used them to decorate our little mud and stick houses, and to make pretty flowerbeds and pathways around them.  In time, my grandfathers grave got to be rather bald and moth eaten.  He was such a lovely old man though, that had he been alive, he probably wouldn't have minded in the least.  In the same way that he used to take out his brown paper packet of sweets to give each of us one, so I could imagine him having a brown packet of little white stones and doling them out to us instead.

The sweet memories of those steamy hot Summer days spent messing around in the family cemetery with its Cyprus tree sentinels, remains with me still.