Maybe this doesn't belong here, but the thread was supposed to be about writing. I think I've seen enough recently that I should be convinced humanity is rotting away, with unnecessary things like kindness and conscience crumbling away first. I don't want to lose mine. This isn't very 'literary' but I'm not sure it should go anywhere else.

There is a wooden cross along the Old New Hampshire Highway. I'm not sure how long it's been there, but I first noticed it a couple of years ago. Some roadwork done this spring, and the road crews must have taken some trouble to make sure the cross was still standing after they findished their work.

Yesterday, I drove east to get some work done on my car, and there was a birthday balloon tied to it, and fresh flowers at its base. Once I noticed it, it's real hard not to look at it every time I go by. I don't know who the cross is for. I know that when I was supposed to meet my real estate agent to look at the house I now live in, she was very late. When she showed up, she was shaking. There had been an accident on the Old New Hampshire Highway. Some car had crossed the road and slammed head-on into another vehicle carrying a mother and her kids. My agent was there before any responders, but they weren't far behind. As the fire department cut through the twisted metal of the car to free the woman and the ambulance crew tried to keep her alive until she got to the hospital, my agent sat in the back of her car with those young kids who cried and clung to her. I never heard what happened, and I don't know what that cross is for, but I don't think mom made it.

I don't know why I care. I don't know why plain wooden crosses and birthday balloons should matter. Everybody loses somebody. Lots of strangers die every day, and lots of them died today. But there's this one plain marker to symbolise the hole in somebody's life, and it's real to me.