Through the bright canopy of a fall-time walnut tree, its leaves Robert Frost yellow, the October sun shone in glints and glances upon an impromptu memorial service that dear old Connie had thrown together for Ms. Marjorie Mayfield, whom no one had seen in about a month.  The muted light was probably for the best, since one might misinterpret someone squinting in the bright sun as being in the first stage of weeping, and really, no one liked Marjorie Mayfield very much.  Wherever she was, dead or alive, the unspoken consensus seemed to be that she had better just stay there.

Dear old Connie had posted a notice of these obsequies on the bulletin board at Summerfield Estates, then paid for a blurb in the Silver Tsunami newsletter, and crossed her fingers.  At the tepid response, however, she just told herself that this handful gathered under the big old walnut tree, its leaves as gold as the dome of a Byzantine church and its nuts like meteors bonking the picnic table and an occasional head, well, these folks were the ones that loved Marjorie Mayfield the most.

Despite their small number, they embraced the spectrum of Merryweather humanity: the narrow-eyed Jay-Douglas "Doogle" Hanson and his fungal amanuensis Anjay Shapurian (no one, even Anjay, was quite sure what nationality he was--but in Merryweather almost everyone had been brainwashed to believe that nationality did not exist); the billiard-ball bald Radu Prinzulescu and his toad-like mother, Maria, looking very much like a Transylvanian barn spirit; the elderly but undiminished Geoffrey Durant-Dupont and his longtime housemate Andreas Stackenwalter, with their Pekingese; and finally young and hale Marco Panzi and Michael Peighsley, whom some (read Doogle and Anjay) whispered were present just to get face-time with any grieving relatives and make a buck by selling off whatever was stewing in Marjorie Mayfield's condo.  But, then, so were Doogle and Anjay.  For as they lifted their plastic dishes of gourmet ice cream, dodged a few black walnuts, and shared highly-edited reminiscences of the mysteriously missing Ms. Marjorie Mayfield, Doogle and Anjay were recalling what she had always said: So many jackals, so few carcasses.

The faithful stood about for a few minutes with their cups of ice cream (which somewhere no doubt was seen as the food of the dead) and smiled pleasantly at one another.  Since Connie had worked hard to put this whole shindig together and was such an angel, it would not do to break her heart.

But in time, everyone (gratefully) dispersed, leaving Connie to gather up the ice cream-coated spoonlets and serving cups and place them in one of those leaf-green Bye-O degradable garbage bags: her little contribution to the Keep Merryweather Green campaign.  With this service to our little town out of the way, she slipped the tops on to the tubs of Cha-Cha Cherry, Mustafa Mocha-Chocolate, Cumulus Cloudberry, and Little Black Bits Vanilla and sighed.  She would have to bring all of this ice cream home, and with her husband being diabetic and even at 79 Connie still trying to keep her figure...But let her freezer bulge.  Anything for a friend.