Burying what there is

The gravedigger was adept with the shovel and pick, with the backhoe too and the bulldozer and the spoon. The poet, wife of the gravedigger, mother of three, was haunted by images she could not control. So she kept with her at all times the tiniest pad and would throw on the pages these waking nightmares. When she came down with pneumonia, it was said, she got sick because, while away from home, she had lost her pad and when she couldn't find it, she began to run and simply couldn't stop. She couldn't stop that is until she collapsed on a stranger's doorstep outside of town. When the poet died, there was a usual funeral, but the gravedigger sick with grief could not dig her grave. A substitute gravedigger had to be found--someone not so adept with the shovel and the pick . . . and the backhoe.