Our Morning Constitutional

Today Sophie and I took a walk around the Montmartre Cemetery right after breakfast.

I love cemeteries.  There is a cemetery on my parent's property, right by our driveway.  I wrote a short story about the name on one of the headstones when I was 13.  It was a tragic love story.  I think cemeteries are so romantic.  Maybe because it is one place where hundreds of love stories are collected in the remnants of people's lives.  Maybe because the many touching memorials to the dead testify that love never dies.  Maybe because being surrounded by death makes the beauty of life stand out in brilliant contrast.  I even want to take my wedding pictures at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston.

One of the first places I visited in Florence was a cemetery, and it was filled with images of Death.  Loved it.  German cemeteries are magnificent, full of trees and draped in flowers, and though the fake flowers and mementoes left on most of the graves are not very picturesque, the graves without them seem very sad and lonely.  French cemeteries, I have today witnessed, are architectural wonders.  The sepulchers are miniature churches, complete with stained glass windows and wrought iron doorways!  Life-size statuary, real works of art, adorn some of the graves.  It is beautiful.

Someone ordered a scale copy of Michelangelo's Moses.

Isn't she lovely?

I think a zombie uprising would be particularly picturesque in a cemetery such as this one.  There is so much going on aesthetically, don't you think?  There are so many layers and levels, and every sepulcher is different.   There could be some cool cinematography.

(found this pic on Google)

(found this pic on Google, too)

Some of these tombs look like there has already been a zombie uprising...

I'm guessing that there aren't any bodies in these.  I mean, never were.  Just ashes, right?

Right?

There were cats all over the place at this cemetery, glaring at us like we were trespassing.  Aren't cats the guardians of the dead in some culture or other?  Maybe they are all that stand between us and a zombie apocalypse.

I personally think we are in good hands.