There are times when a weekend lasts forever; those are likely tied to the amount of novelty crammed into these hours outside of routine. When the objective is to find isolation and relative familiarity to be quiet, explore stillness, and remove one’s self from distractions experienced at home, there is a contraction of time. As the moment of departure approaches for our return to Phoenix, there is a sense that our arrival was only hours ago, yet here we are about to leave. Even if we won’t get in our car for a few hours from now, the sense of things is such that closure is beginning, and the wait is only a reinforced effort to delay the inevitable.

In turn, we attempt to give purpose to the time that is spent lingering in place, and for us, that means heading out for a walk, though breakfast could have been an option at the local diner had we not already made arrangements with our hosts. Instead, we attract the barking of a dozen different dogs who might be sending mixed signals that we should either stay away or maybe come near to give them rubs and scratches. Dogs can be hard to read when teeth are glaring and their barking sounds ferocious, but then there are those wagging tails that suggest friendliness if you can get over the neurotic yammering of excitement. And so it was as a dog offered up its warnings, except this one wasn’t behind a fence. Something inside me said that this dog was all bluster, but inside was pure love, so I harkened for her to come over. Up she ran, dropping right between my legs, rolling over for belly rubs to suck up the attention.

Over at the old cemetery, there was nobody looking for attention, just a bunch of dead people contemplating the weight of earth resting upon their corpses. Many of the gravestones are now missing, the telltale sign of the mound the only reminder that there are bones below. This is Duncan’s oldest cemetery, as far as I know. As I have done at other times, I’m taking this opportunity to note that someone is remembering a person who may be long forgotten. Ida Ann Tipton was born on January 1, 1899, and sadly passed away only 43 days later on February 13, 1899. Her parents had the following engraved on the back of her tombstone: Another little lamb has gone. To dwell with Him who gave another little darling babe is sheltered in the grave. God needed one more angel child amidst his shining band. And so he bent with loving smile and clasped our darling’s hand.

The rocks and tombstones persist, while some random anonymous artifacts of those who’ve lived and died here in the Duncan area are the only tangible memories remaining in the local antique store. Those clues to others’ lives are bartered for cash, so the survivors are able to continue the economic engine that becomes the only threads that signify that they, too, once existed. How long before we become responsible for creating digital memorials of our ancestors? However, I could also see a mass erasure of a majority of those when future generations realize just how insipid their relatives were, and nobody would care that they had existed on propagandistic idiotic television, ate a poor diet, smoked, and drank too much.

It’s probably better that we all turn to dust and that everything decays and disappears. In our own time, the majority of us humans are already archaic, poorly educated cogs in a machine of exploitation that relies on qualities that leave us not as memorable people but easily forgotten fodder whose memory might continue on in the odd person or two though it’s just as likely our demise will simply go unnoticed. From the German brothers from Hanover, Germany, who gave us Clabber Girl Baking Powder seen on this relic of a sign from the 1940s, who nobody remembers anymore to Madam C.J. Walker, who some believe was the first self-made female millionaire in the U.S., making a fortune with her natural hair products for other black women, most contributions to humanity are long forgotten before the ink dries. We are all fading in and out of existence with nary a blink of an eye, but while we are here, we are at the center of a universe that is all about us.