We Were Here

We went where strawberries are ripe, and the sound of fiddles and bodhrans echoed around the valley.

Little lips licked spoons clean of red juice and biscuits. We bounced, swayed and chatted under a twilight summer sun.

Then, when bouncing turned to stir crazy, the stroller became a resting place as we wandered the old grounds. History in the ground that holds secrets of blood and war. Old wood that creaks with whispers of children from ages long forgotten, sanctuaries for those who fought their brothers, barns that sheltered the ones who worked the ground.

There stood the stones. Anchored in story-telling earth, each one calling out to anyone who will listen. I was here. 
I lived. 
I breathed. 
I walked this earth like you. 
I dreamed. 
52 years. 84 years. 3 years. 
I was here.

I wonder at them. The ones with fresh grass, fresh flowers, fresh tears.

The ones who are remembered, but are long gone. We still say - You were here. You mattered. We remember.

Even those born, 1703. The stone stands tall among marble. I want to sit silently for a minute, lay against the earth and ask... "Have we ruined this place? Was the pain the same? Did you laugh with family and sing and dance and dream? Did your children pull at your leg and you smile wearily?" I imagine him saying, "Go! Run! Keeping living and stop sitting by!"

My mother whispers, "None of us get out alive, do we?"

No, we don't. We work. We laugh. We weep. We live together. And we hope someday, someone, our children or maybe a wandering woman hundreds of years from now will stop, sidle up beside our memory and say, "I know you were here." They will hear my whisper, still echoing with fiddles and bodhrans, "Go. Run."