Under The Tall Oaks pt.2

By mid-May there are lilacs blooming. Dragonflies litter the sky, and the air smells the same way that I imagine the Garden of Eden did – like growing plants and a type of excitement that has distinctly Holy notes to it. As if God had just, moments ago, walked through.

Almost every night it rains hard, washing away all traces of yesterday. In the early mornings the sidewalks are still dark and damp and there are worms all over parking lots. They travel back home, slowly, before the heat of the day comes around to dry everything up.

The diner up town is busy with the sound of knives and forks and coffee cups being set on well-worn tabletops. By mid-morning, an arts fair has set been set up in the town’s community center. All the shops leave their doors propped open with overflowing flowerpots, welcoming in shoppers and summertime itself.

But that’s all in town. At Woodland Cemetery it’s quiet, the frogs sing ballads to Ann as she makes flower crowns out of dandelions and deer cross the road and hop the rusty fence to the woods beyond. She is blissfully unaware of the bustle of town; she knows only the tall grass and the backroads that cross in front of the cemetery.

***

The last time we spoke I told you Jamie was the type that inspired feelings of love – I believe this is because of the silent steady way he had about him. I don’t want to lead you to believe that Jamie inspired a frenzy of burning passion. It was that one could grow so easily, painfully fond of him- almost without knowing it. A turning on of a longing within someone, deep within someone- a calling of sorts. Something I have no name for; that’s what Jamie afflicted.

Those days, the early days of loving Jamie, were dog eared in Ann’s mind. She’d return to them often, flipping through them over and over like well-loved pages in a favorite book. Lying in the grass, cloud watching, she would listen to the music he played as he worked. There was a hypnotic quality about that time. It created a burning in her heart.

It’s unknown the last time Ann had liked someone in the romantic sense of the word. The period of her existence that involved relationships and boys was so long ago, that the feelings that were developing in her heart and lungs out there on Woodland Road seemed to Ann to be entirely new.

Standing still, toes scrunched into the soft dirt, hair pulling and tangling in the breeze, this feeling – which I know to be longing - felt fatal to Ann. She was unprepared, with no defense against the ache. It throbbed as if she had been shot.

Longing, which we all know to be the worst of the emotions, infected Ann entirely. It started as a hiccup in her heart then it beat and pumped throughout her entire body, growing roots in her lungs and blooming in her mind. She’d squeeze her eyes shut and clench her teeth to try to ward it off, standing with her arms wrapped around her ribs to hold herself together.

It was agony to exist inches close to him and also years away. Sometimes, she wished that he would never come back. She wished the bleeding she felt in her body would clot. A stronger feeling though, was the fear that he would never come back. Having known him, how was she to exist never seeing him again? She’d feel adrift for forever.

Ann had no concept of time, but she knew the moment the morning light hit the little hill in front of Little Italy Acres, his truck would come around the bend in Rider Road. She’d run to the fence that faced the road, watching him come in as the sun rose. She also knew that once the frogs started singing, he would soon leave. Agony.

In a backwards way, Ann felt lonelier since knowing about Jamie. To see him, so close, but always out of reach awoke a feeling of homesickness. Everything she wanted was a few feet away and entirely too alive. Was it better before Jamie came around? She sometimes wondered what she had felt before knowing of Jamie. Had she felt anything at all? Or was life just listless? She couldn’t remember.

“Please never come back – I can’t live this way,” her Longing begged.

“Please take me with you,” Hope whispered.

I haven’t mentioned Jamie’s feeling much yet, and I fear that you might assume he is getting off scot free in this whole ordeal. I can assure you he isn’t. He doesn’t know of Ann or her love for him, but he does know how he feels once he arrives at the cemetery. There’s a loosening of his chest as he parks the truck in the small parking lot. There’s a sense of belonging that he attributes to the quiet and sunshine.

Sometimes in the corner of his eye he catches glimpses of something he can’t be sure of. He’ll glance over his shoulder occasionally, expecting someone to be standing just behind him. He wonders sometimes, as he eats lunch sitting against one of the great oaks, if he sees something sitting away from him in the grass. Not exactly someone, but the shadow of someone who has just been there. A whisper of someone being with him.

When his boss calls him a few weeks in, to ask how things are going, he laughs and says, “Do you think the place could be haunted?”