The rocky crag I am sitting on is only 50 yards from my dad’s marker. I can see all the way around me, the Big Belts to the Crazies to the Snowies, from this perch on Daisy Peak. I have a drop off to my back and each time I move a little, I feel un-ease from my calves through my entire torso. Of course the danger is all in my head. I am a yard from the edge. But the internal fear lends to the effort of having climbed up here… of having made this trip to be with Dad. I still sense Dad after 16 years. He loved this place and introduced it to me in his death. Would he be surprised at me sitting here year after year? It is nice to think of his ashes having made their way into the stones here, filling pores and perhaps becoming geologically part of the stone, like petro glyphs. I am newly thinking of post death being a time you actually become part of the land…. Dad part of these rocks.
