A young woman has been sitting by a grave every morning at 8:00 as I commute past, and I cannot help wondering about her story, and her grief, and her devotion.  Fresh flowers appear weekly in the vase, this week white and passion purple.  The bright warm colors of the mums I planted have brought me happiness each morning and evening I leave from and return to my parents’ home, which they keep telling me is my home, too.  Color is happiness, I think.  Fushcia.  Yellow cream.  Tangerine.  Scarlet blending to barn red.  Dad effused as I maneuvered his wheelchair for him to see them.  Color is happiness.  And color is grief, and color is comfort.  The hardest aspect of having the basal cell cancer scraped from Dad’s left nasal fold was the effort of the trip with its great strainings into and out of the Faithful Suburban.  Every aspect of the next day’s visit to the dentist, or should I say the oral maxillofacial surgeon, who pulled and yanked and twisted at the infected tooth which finally came forth with it enormous roots half again the size of the tooth, proved arduous.  Mom asked for the tooth.  “I don’t want to see it,” I announced, but at home she wanted to show me anyway.  “Why would I possibly want to see that bloody tooth!” I retorted.  I quease at blood and everything else that belongs on the body’s inside.  Sarah, though, will find it fascinating: she has a strong stomach and an eager medical mind.  Poor Dad had to deal with a bleeding mouth and an anesthetized face and bloody gauze and salt water rinses and feeling beat up.  Waiting for the surgeon, Dad told me had been in lots of fights in high school, but his fights involved stepping in to stop other fights and to rescue the bullied, and his toughness intimidated the tough guys, even though one punch did break his nose, and the doctor rammed two rods up his nostrils and lifted the broken bones and set them back where they belonged.  Despite the tooth extraction trauma, the pain never came, which astonished me for the depth of the abscess and the size of the gape left behind.  Grandpa Wallace had lost all but his front teeth before Mom outgrew girlhood.  She remembers his slightly sunken cheeks, and she remembers standing by his side as the dentist pulled what teeth he had left—she had insisted on being there, a little girl defending her dad.  Dentures followed healing, and Wally was so happy with his full cheeks and full mouth of teeth, for now he could eat everything he loved but had been denied him for years, including apples, carrots, and corn on the cob.  And Mom was happy for his happiness.  The family, as it grew, had no money for dentists.  “Thank God for Harvey!” Mom sighed.  Uncle Harvey had married into the family and become a dentist, and forever after gave the children free dental care, including many fillings.  His jolly laughter resounds in my memory these decades after his death.  This morning the young woman lay in the wet grass wrapped in a blanket against the cold and slept on the grave, and I felt a blend of admiration for her great love and of sadness for her great loss.