There was little sunlight here. Cool shadows touched her face as she moved across the moist earth. Wondering, she dropped her basket and stepped further, drawn to the cool quiet.
In the middle of the garden was a plot surrounded by a corroded iron fence and marked by a headstone. Blanche could not read the time-obscured script, but as she recognized the trappings of a grave she no longer felt alone.
Around the abandoned grave grew wild pink roses whose long, curving thorns were as noticeable as its silken buds. Blanche bent and harvested several of the oldest blossoms to her basket. Late lilies grew around the garden walls: their fragrance was thrown with overgrown honeysuckle climbing the walls and every surface.
Blanche breathed deeply of the scented air, feeling that she had somehow come home. But the house to whom this garden belonged was a pile of rubble and ash, collapsed but for stone chimneys.
She dared not stay much longer. It was enough to have discovered this place and have a few moments of its solitude. She looked at the grave and on impulse, pulled the ribbon from her hair and wrapped it around her pink bouquet. It was her offering to appease the dead, for she had disturbed a place not traveled since perhaps her birth.
Sent from Amanda's Treo @-'-,--