I wanted to go the graveyard on Samhuin and leave offerings to the forgotten dead, but life and magic kept getting in the way so I took the hint from spirit and went on the third day. I paid a penny and some tobacco to the gatekeeper and left the food offerings from the ancestral altar along with tobacco and my Saturnian mead by the biggest and oldest tree in the cemetery, a great oak.
The tree, the spirits, and I shared a drink and then I removed fallen branches of oak covering a number of graves and wiped off many leaves covering the names of the dead. I walked through the graveyard looking at the names and carvings and blessings of love. This city is the oldest in the province so there were many forgotten graves; some pushed off to the side and some paved over. The ones belonging to children break my heart, there are so many, their silence contrasted against the screams and laughter of living children walking through the cemetery to get home from school.
The death card of the tarot is truly represented here – people from all walks of life and many different cultures. There are Irish graves, Russian graves, German graves, English graves, and Scottish graves. There is a sea captain, a bishop, and a doctor. Couples with long marriages who died the same year, young single men, and children and babies. Death takes them all into her embrace. The air takes on a freezing chill, a few drops of what feels like snow melt on my skin and then a cold hard rain pours down from the ominous gray clouds as dark as the oldest of gravestones. The crows come, hundreds of them. Flying from tree to tree and circling one area of graves. They follow me and stare and caw at me curiously.
I am surprised to see flowers left at some of the oldest graves – roses for the dead. I was happy to find the cemetery full of female yew trees covered in fleshy red berries and spiderwebs. I chose to harvest yew berries from the four yews marking the grave of the Anglican bishop, buried at the four-way crossroads in a circle. He became the first bishop of the city on All Saints Day. I lit a cigar and left it on his grave. Old Man’s presence is heavy here.
I harvested yew berries from each of the four trees and then said my thanks and farewells to the dead and the crows and, leaving another penny at the crossroad, continued into the cold rain to finish the errands of my day.
