Jack had a good laugh and he was the only person on Earth I knew who had feet wider and uglier than mine. The last time we talked we sat in the grass just laughing at one another's feet.

While I was bent over inside the grave, I reflected on the fact that something unseen behind all the dusty-smelling earth around me shows a great passion for life. Scientists now say that life appeared on Earth just as soon as the Earth had cooled enough for life to be possible. Creatures have been discovered living in hot-water vents in the oceans' deepest regions and in cracks thousands of feet below the Earth's surface, where earlier no one dreamed that life could exist. The Universe seems to be a theater in which life is the crowning act.

Walking home in the afternoon sun, my body buzzing with the fatigue of a day of digging, it further occurred to me that we humans just can't know what lies beyond the end of life. Yet, because the Creator so obviously rejoices in rambunctious life, and has a sense of humor and a genius capable of creating things like giraffes, slime molds and Jack's feet, it seems a good bet that if anything at all happens to the "soul" at life's end, it cannot be something that -- if we could just grasp the Creator's whole concept -- we would call bad.

Maybe it is all this simple: There was Jack and this was good and beautiful. Today is today, and dust passes to dust. Life goes on as ever.

*****

JUNE APPLES

The plantation's orchard is in bad shape. Most of its trees have died and been cleared away, leaving only three apple trees, a number of pear trees, and a grassy meadow. Diseases, the recent drought and general neglect have taken their toll. Nothing seems to kill the pear trees, however, and the three remaining apple trees produce more than we can eat, to the raccoons' advantage.

Saturday I went apple gathering. I tarried beneath a tree and while gazing across the meadow where once dozens of varieties of fruit trees flourished, chomped down on a tart but sublimely juicy and tasty specimen that was green, with just a touch of burgundy on its shoulders.

As I ate I couldn't avoid remembering something from the Real McCoys, a TV show I watched with my family back in the 60s. In that episode a "city slicker" visited the McCoy farm. He was the most handsome, rich, physically powerful and certainly the most sophisticated person any of the McCoys had ever seen. The whole show was about how the McCoy men-folk dealt with their jealousies. At the end of the show Luke, the family's father, in a gesture of goodwill, and perhaps surrender, offered the departing visitor an apple. The visitor grimaced and said that with all his cares his stomach couldn't take it.