It was cold today, the wind howling, the leaves wild, and the Mount Auburn Cemetery crowded with pedestrians and cars and performers and singers and warblers.  We even heard an accordion player and watched awestruck a majestic hawk, indifferent, perhaps even oblivious to our amazement.  (He’s in the penultimate picture.)

Soon snow will set in, and all will be inert for months and months and months.  Today was a festival of sorts, the burning sun before the dark, the animation before the long silence of the dead, the exuberance before long wait.  But even in winter, in the bone-chilling cold of winter, Mount Auburn is a beautiful place, the living–most of them–having left, and the dead in full domination, reminding the few daring visitors that to befriend the dead is to know life, life which is its own reward, its own spring.

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