In a Dark Corner

There is a road that slips between the main road on the school run. A country lane stranded in the middle of suburban sprawl.

You turn off the traffic and suddenly you are somewhere older. A crumbling estate half-hidden by hedges. An old church and its churchyard. Trees…old, old trees…arching over the roadway like a green cathedral roof. Horses grazing. Sheep in the pasture. A pocket of countryside that has refused to move on.

In early spring the verges fill with daffodils. I wait for them each year.

The churchyard is edged with an old stone wall that looks out over woods and fields. The further back you walk, the further back in time you go. At the front, it is all neatness and memory arranged politely, primroses, daffodils, the elegant war memorial standing straight-backed and solemn.

But step beyond that, further in, and something shifts.

It becomes older. Wilder.

The stones lean and sink. Moss drips from cold surfaces. Trees hang low, branches trailing like uncombed hair. Angel eyes carved in stone glance endlessly toward heaven or earth. Cherubs smile in a way that feels both sweet and knowing. Stone books are forever open to unread pages. Harps that will never sound. Crosses bound in ivy. Beauty and sorrow braided together with every step.

And at the very back of the churchyard, tucked into a crumbling corner where woods meet field and the wall gives way, there is a grave for a horse. A beloved horse from several centuries ago. His resting place is, in my opinion, the most beautiful part of the graveyard. The wildest part. The place where the boundary breaks and the land begins again.

I always imagine him chestnut brown and gentle, lifting his head curiously over that broken wall. I feel an ache when I think of such strength and grace folded into the dark earth. I want to unfasten the soil. I want to lift his bones into the air and offer them back to the wind…to let him run again in some other form. To let the sky have him.

Across the top of his grave, a hundred daffodils rise each spring. I picture hands, long ago, pressing those bulbs carefully into the soil. Were they the hands that brushed his mane? That held the reins? That loved him enough to give him such a noble resting place? I think so.

The wind moves through the daffodils, and they bow and lift, bow and lift.

Here is love from a century ago, made visible again. Here is remembrance and devotion that outlived the body.

You were loved, they seem to say. You are remembered.

And for one bright, fragile moment in the dark corner of an old churchyard, the sun catches on yellow petals and everything is golden.

All of life is there.

Sadness.

Grief.

Sorrow.

Rebirth.

Hope.

Joy.

Love.