The Bench

2 points · October 2026 · 2 comments

There is a bench at the top of the hill with a plaque on it, and the plaque says a name and two dates and who loved this view, and I have sat on it a hundred times and only this week thought about the person.

They loved this view. That is all I know. Not who they were, or what they did, or who had the plaque made — a spouse, a child, a friend with a small budget and a specific grief. Just that they came here, and looked at this, and someone who knew them well enough to know it wanted the fact to outlast them by the length of a bench.

It is a modest kind of immortality. It does not say remembered by all who knew them. It does not say beloved. It says they liked a hill, and here is the hill, and you may sit on it too.

I have been thinking about what my plaque would say. Not what I would want it to say — that is a different and more embarrassing question — but what someone who knew me would choose, from everything, as the one fact worth a bench. I do not know. I am not sure I have a hill. I am not sure I have looked at anything a hundred times on purpose.

So I am starting. This bench, this view, and I will come back, and if it turns out to be my hill then someone will know, and if it does not then I will have sat on a hill a hundred times, which is not the worst way to have spent them.