Free write--unattended graves.

It was a spring ritual when I was a child. My mother, grandmother, brother and I would pile into the car.

Our first stop was Weston's greenhouse where we would buy flowers, usually red geraniums.

Then we would go to the cemetery in Malden, where my grandmother would plant the flowers as my brother and I would run among the gravestones. Now I realize that geraniums last, which is probably why chose them for her father, son Gordon and baby daughter Lois. She also planted some at the grave of her sister-in-law's family.

The last thing we would do before we left was get water from the faucet to make sure the plants had a good start.

My grandmother has been buried with her loved ones for 53 years. My mother could not bring herself to add her mother's name, and I had to do it. 

I've never been back there even when I lived in Boston not even when I am in Malden visiting my daughter who now lives there.

My mother's ashes are scattered in a wood per her request.

My father's and stepmom's ashes lie in a Florida cemetery. The day we interned my father I said to my cousin, "It's so small,"

"He wasn't very big," she said, and I said, "He wasn't that small."

I haven't visited. I haven't planted geraniums of any color.

In many places in Europe burial plots are rented and when the contract is over the remains are removed. I have no idea to where.

I have visited the graves of Collette, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II, Richard the Lionhearted, Guillaume le Bâtard. I have left flowers on the grave of the unknown soldier buried where he fell in the first battle of the American Revolution in Lexington, but never have I gone to visit my relatives.

I don't know why. Perhaps because they are still living in my memories, perhaps I do not want to imagine what time has done to their remains. Maybe because I can still remember chasing my brother above the gravestones on a spring day.