Between church services on Sunday I took the kids for “an adventure.”
That’s Koetsier family code for: let’s go somewhere and have some fun, when we don’t know where to go. Ususally we just leave the house and go wherever our fancy takes us.
We ended up taking a walk around Albert Dyck Park, which is some sort of an erstwhile quarry that has been turned into a lake and a park.
After the park, we just drove – turning whenever we wanted, and ended up passing a tiny little church cemetery.
Gabrielle, our oldest child (7) and only girl, wanted to take a look, so we did, walking through, reading the inscriptions, and checking the dates on the headstones.
There must have been some fad in graves in Abbotsford around the 1940s and ’50s, since many of the graves from that time had not only headstones but some kind of convex-curved, roughly coffin-shaped concrete stone or cover over the place where the holes must have been dug and the bodies laid.
It’s always sobering to walk through a graveyard, comforting to read the inscriptions like “safe in the arms of Jesus,” or “now with the great Physician” (on the grave of a doctor), and complexly sad to see the headstones with dates that aren’t far apart.
Ethan, our middle child (4), gathered some flowers and started picking the petals off and sprinkling them on the graves.
The wind picked up, foiling his efforts, and he, irked, said: “Hey! The wind is blowin’ my stuff away!”
Dead right, little guy.