It’s Halloween. Richard always had a good time with Halloween.
So after church this morning we stopped in Kroger and got a couple of helium filled Mylar Halloween balloons to take to the cemetery.
It was a beautiful morning, perfectly clear sky and crisp but not too cool air.
A hundred feet or so from Richard’s grave is a small grove of trees. There are a couple of real tall trees there. As we left our car and started walking to Richard’s grave we were greeted with birds chirping. It sounded like hundreds of them, coming from those trees. Reminded me of the old Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds. They were just chattering up a storm.
So we were standing there holding our balloons and talking to Richard. The birds were making a racket. We couldn’t see them, but it sounded like those trees were filled with them.
Finally we told Richard happy Halloween and Debbie and I released our balloons into the air, hoping maybe they would sail up to him in heaven.
As our fingers pulled away from the strings and the balloons started to rise into the sky – the cemetery went silent. Not a tweet. It was like the birds just vanished.
We watched the balloons rise higher and higher, until they vanished into the sun filled sky.
And the birds were still silent.
We stayed a little while longer, talking to Richard more. And the birds never made another sound. It was still quiet when we left.
That was really kind of weird.
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