As I said last week, I’m in Texas. I’m still running around taking photos, but I’m also on vacation so I haven’t bothering uploading and culling them yet. But I do still have some photos from my last trip, which is what these are. They’re related to a scene in my story “A Few May Remember” (the college this references is Schreiner University, where I did my BA degree):
The cemetery where they buried Joseph sat behind the college where Sharon and Mark had met. It looked beautiful in the late winter despite the chill, and the breeze blew this perfect, gentle breath. Back there in the stones and markers and trees, the noise of highway 27 never quite registered. Sharon used to spill down the dirt slope behind her dorm and cross the little creek that separated the cemetery from the school and walk back there, just to get away from campus for a few minutes. Sometimes she brought Mark with her, late in the evening with a beer and four-pack of wine coolers. Mark drank Natural Lite; Sharon liked piña colada. On this day, a couple of days after the funeral, Sharon brought not wine coolers but her letter inside a small archival box she’d bought in an office supply store, and her fireplace shovel.
In the cemetery, the live oaks hung with dried ball moss and the cedars oozed sap, and a fresh rain had come down the hill into the little creek, so the water smelled clean, like stones and ice. Across the creek and through the thick woods, up the dirt slope, some college students in sweats played volleyball behind the old brick dorm where Sharon used to live.
She walked down into the woods toward the thin streak of water, where she poked around until she found a soft spot on a slope of the bank. She set down the box and began digging with the fireplace shovel. It took her forty minutes, but she managed a hole about a foot square and three feet deep. She raised the box to her lips and whispered to it. “Your name was Sharon Reeves,” she said.
Samuel Snoek-Brown 