A world of difference is the single letter that finds a home in the word ‘place’ (does it not stand for ‘love’?) but that is missing from the word ‘pace.’
Our pace was admittedly slow as we drove about the countryside, too slow apparently for some whose familiarity with the turns and twists in the road showed in the occasional tailgater hurrying somewhere for some evidently important reason.
We wandered among the grave markers in the church yard, the engravings barely distinguishable in the setting sun. Two of the headstones, side by side, were for twins. They were but one year old.
Had parents and grandparents watched in wonder their slow pace, their faltering gait, even whispering the number of each tentatively placed chubby little foot, as their toddlers took their first steps? And what grief there was now etched in granite!
The two empty chairs arranged in a pair on the porch of the log cabin – how long had it been since the two occupants of the rustic abode had ceased the pace of their labors and simply sat there at the end of the day, “looking out at the water or the big shade trees,” as Billy Collins wrote in his poem “The Chairs That No One Sits In”?
Then there was an outline of the two of us, our shadowed images looking back up at us but with features indistinct as if our portrait had been filled in with a black marker.
Our reflection on the dark water below the walkway where we stood, lily pads among the fallen leaves of autumn, spoke again – like the grave markers, like the empty chairs – that there is indeed a single letter with a world of difference.
How life quickly passes, and how much love means in the place where we are.
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