One day while out on a walk, Rebecca asked how we knew for sure that we weren't stepping over burials. I thought she was referring to prehistoric burial mounds, and started a long explanation about the geology and archaeology of this valley, and how we were more likely to be walking over sea fossils than human graves. But then I understood that her mind wasn't traveling that far back in time (prehistory to her is, after all, that long time ago when her parents were children!), and that she was concerned with the recently deceased: she knew they got buried under the ground, but just exactly where was the missing piece of information.
So we walked up to the top of the hill where the village little cemetery is, and we visited the graves: Rebecca had picked wild flowers along the way, and she placed them on one of the tombs, then asked me to read to her each plaque, and wanted to hear all I knew about the deceased. I was surprised about how many of them I'd either known, or known about, and was glad we'd taken that walk and commemorated them. In the end, it was a learning experience as much for me as for 5-year-old Rebecca.
