Momento Mori

Shortly after we arrived in Maine a mouse died under the floorboards in our bathroom. At least, we thought it was a mouse at first but the length of time the smell lasted made J. think it was something larger, a red squirrel maybe. Isn’t it strange that death has a smell. And that the smell dies also, after a time. We were living then in an apartment attached to an old farmhouse that had been converted into an inn. The farmhouse was on one of the many narrow fingers of rock that stick out into the Atlantic ocean. At night we could hear the surf. Strange how darkness conducts sound better than day. It makes a person wonder what else is conducted. J. would often say how precarious he felt. “We’re living on a rock in the middle of the ocean!” As if we could capsized in our living room. And then there were the pocket graveyards, small plots of a dozen or so stones we’d suddenly come upon around a corner, along the side of the road or in between two houses. Some fenced, some well kept, but others rangy and overgrown with milkweed and thistle, headstones like broken teeth. The people who used to live here wanted to keep their dead close. Or maybe they simply did not know a way to keep them distant.