All landscapes hold their own secrets. Layer on layer, the past is buried beneath the surface. Seldom irretrievable, it lurks, waiting for human curiosity or a freak accident of nature to force the secrets to the surface. Like the poor, the past is always with us.

A corpse I could cope with. It was the situation that threw me. For most people, an element of mystery shrouds the departure of the soul from its earthly home of bone, muscle, fat and sinew. For me, I was just freaked out about a body I had to dispose of lest I end up in jail, or swinging gently in the new spring breeze from a noose. My options were narrowed down to two. Call the constable or plant a garden.

If you know me at all, you know how I love digging in the dirt.

It was just starting to rain by the time night had finally rolled around again and I had dragged Phillip from the kitchen floor where he had collapsed some 24 hours earlier. The drops were gentle, almost pleasant, but a dark cloud overhead told me not to expect a light spring shower. We might be on the brink of April showers bring May flowers, but in the realm, heavy rain was almost always expected to be torrential. It struck me that digging in wet conditions might be dangerous, but I dropped Phillip to the ground near the flowerbed and grabbed the shovel anyway.

Mother Nature and the Grim Reaper must have a pact against the living.

Phillip had started to stiffen up. I?ll spare you of any snide bedroom remarks. Suffice it to say, Phillip was known for his fondness of stiff drinks. By the time he stumbled across the threshold of home sweet home, every limb was pretty well loosened up and not of much use.

His right leg lay along the ground. The left stuck out away from his body, the foot hovering a foot above the lush green grass. Had he been asleep, his pose would have been comic; dead, it was grotesque. A small army of flies arrived as if the dinner bell had ringed and were buzzing around his head.

Decomposition begins at the moment of death and I knew it was already mustering speed inside Phillip. Flies would lay their eggs and within hours the maggots would hatch and start tearing their way through his flesh. To cap it, two crows perched on the fence near by, their gaze shifting from Phillip to me.

I involuntarily shuddered while doing a morose little shake and shimmy in my dark yard to ward off any inclinations of heaving into my neighbor, Miss Creswell?s, Rhododendrons. I didn?t know if I could bury Phillip, but I couldn?t just stand by and watch while maggots and birds turned my husband into a takeaway meal.

Looking back to the flowerbed, I calculated quickly. I would need a big whole, at least six feet long and two feet deep. That was a lot of earth, the conditions were far from ideal and I was no gravedigger. I planted flowers and shrubs, for gosh sake. I planted life! Not the dead. On the fence post one of the crows smirked and did a cocky little side-step shuffle. I clenched my teeth and started digging.

I smiled and stretched and sniffed the morning. Wood smoke; biscuits baking; the cool, rivery smell of dew. Something not quite daylight looked in my window, and something not quite darkness stared back out. A tired cricket sang itself to sleep. The cricket had worked all night. I rose to meet the waiting day. Then remembered the events of the night before as my muscles screamed in protest.

How can I be a widow? Widows wear horn-rimmed glasses and cardigan sweaters that smell like mothballs and have crepe-paper skin and names like Hilda or Gladys and meet with their other widow friends once a week to play bridge. I'm only twenty-six. I just got used to the idea of being married, only test-drove the words my husband for two years: My husband and I, my husband and I...after all that time being single!

The white jasmine was in bloom. Blossoms were gathered in silver bowls throughout the rooms, and the scent had taken possession of the house. From my bedroom window upstairs I watched the garden, the curve of flowerbeds, the neighbors spraying their own lawns, fans of water arcing out at sunrise.

Only three years ago there had been a much different garden...

We wended our way out and to the far side of the rose garden. I asked about his work. He named a public office. It was a rough place and had gangs. "We're into politics," he said, his jaw setting suddenly with this. Voices rose from the veranda, laughter, and then someone put on a record. A slow, dreamy summer love song.

He stared at the trees. "You have guests. You should go back."

"Remember when I taught you to dance?"

"That was another life."

He said it with a quiet anger, and then stared at me, the anger plucked away, his eyes searching my face. The hum of cicadas rose to a throbbing around us, the leaves above shivering with a breeze that ruffled my dress and hair. He hovered in the shadows for a moment, and then stepped in close. He bent down and, gripping me, pressed his lips to my mouth with a quiet urgency, then a crushing force, and I felt shaken as if given desire and elation and life forever.

Emerging through the trees to the sweep of lawns, we saw in the distance the house rising, the veranda draped in flowering wisteria, the spectacle of guests under lanterns. We hovered like phantoms at this distant border, and I thought, That's what we are, he and I, a separate world.

Summer still lingered, the leaves of the plane trees and walnuts brown and withering at the edges. The sky was overcast, threatening rain, the late afternoon unusually muggy..

The sky thundered, an eerie color; then suddenly there was hail. The garden turned gray and menacing, shrouded by hailstones the size of bullets. We came running in under the roofed porch, my hair and face wet. Evening fell with the roads washed down, the pavement glistening like coal. Summer was finally over.

I was jerked out of my memories when one of the shutters banged shut then drifted open, buffeted by the wind; it left a wedge of brilliant sunlight across the bed, making the sheet celestially luminous in the cool, shadowed room. For now, I had to go on through life as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Men left for work in the morning only to vanish into the multiverse all the time. Right?