All Saints: A Visit to the Graveyard

Mailboxes at the Cemetery
I like the looks of these . . .
maybe it's not too late to send that letter . . .
"No one gets a thousand years; but if you're lucky you get twenty thousand days and the chance to put down a 'million' things. . . . and one thing I've learned is that the private fingerings of ordinary experience can fill up notebooks as interestingly as musings on great events . . . Time is the strongest thing of all, and the diarist is always fleeing it. He knows he will eventually be run to earth, but his hope is that his book will let each day live beyond its midnight, let it continue somewhere outside its place in a finite row of falling dominoes."

American novelist & critic, Thomas Mallon (b. 1951)
from the introduction to his book
A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries


Appearing as the epilogue in Mallon's book
is this fitting thought for All Saints Day:

"Why do we wish to be remembered, even when none remain who looked upon our face? Surely, though it must retain an element of self- consideration, it is a last acknowledgment that we need to be loved; and, having gone from all touch, we trust that memory may, as it were, keep our unseen presence within the borders of day."

Scottish poet & diarist, William Soutar (1898 - 1943)

"It was suddenly a warm afternoon,
a lost summer day in late autumn."
from The Saffron Kitchen
by Yasmin Crowther1 November 2011