* * *

I continued walking until I stood in front of the glorious thistles. Yes, they were glorious. How could anyone think badly about thistles after watching goldfinches feasting on the seeds?

No point in delaying the inevitable, I grabbed the first stalk with my bare hand and broke it off about a foot and a half above the ground. The sharp prickles dug into the skin of my fingers. I didn’t see any blood, so kept on going, alternating between my left and right hand as I counted how many stems I had broken off. I needed twenty-three.

Once finished, slim red scratches marked my fingers, palms and wrists. You’d think I’d been in a fight with some nasty barbed-wire and lost. “Get on with it,” I said to myself. I reached into my other pocket and pulled out a length of wide black satin ribbon. After arranging the thistles into a bouquet of sorts, I wrapped the ribbon around their stems a couple of times and tied it into a bow.

Holding the bundle of thistles upside-down, I headed for the opening in the trees. Most of the leaves had already dropped. I dragged my booted feet through the crispy layers covering the pathway. It took about ten minutes of walking until I recognized the large rock which had split into two separate pieces. Almost exactly in half.

I placed the thistles on top of the rock, covering the widest portion of the fissure. “Well, it’s that time of year again,” I said, kicking the stone with my foot. “Wake the hell up! You’ve got a visitor. Your one and only visitor ‘cause no one else knows you’re here. I brought you twenty-three thistles—one for each of the times you did something illegal, immoral or unsavoury—at least the ones I know about.”

It was the last time I would mark the anniversary of his death. The memories of his misdeeds had unknowingly taken over too much of my life. Not quite an obsession, but only one or two contemplations shy of it.