Wings

While I was snapping photographs in Oller Cemetery yesterday afternoon, not really noticing how quiet it was in the country graveyard alongside the Scioto River, I heard the sound of flapping wings overhead.

Not flap-flap-flap; more like FLAP-FLAP.

Big wings.

When I looked up, I saw something that I had never seen: a bald eagle. First I noticed his white tail; then, when he turned to circle the cemetery again, his “bald” head.

That’s when I broke my Rule of Cemetery Stillness and shouted out to my husband, a dozen rows away.

“Roy! Eagle!”

We watched as the eagle made several lazy circles around the cemetery before disappearing behind the trees.

I turned my attention back to the modern monument, a vaulted obelisk, that I was photographing. The Williams monument at the back of Oller Cemetery is forever “the eagle monument” in my mind.

WILLIAMS

J. WESLEY
OCTOBER 1, 1930
MAY 21, 2008

PATRICIA EILEEN
(DeNUNE)
NOVEMBER 26, 1930








Oller Cemetery, Delaware County, Ohio