Once, driving home under a full moon, I passed a cemetery full of cows. They’d broken down the fence keeping them in their pasture across the street and were happily grazing on the fresh grass between the graves. Moonlit cows bending heads to the ground, silhouetted against tombstones. A sense of celebration, somehow, as if they were performing some sort of annual bovine full-moon ritual. One curious cow, chewing its cud in front of the wrought iron churchyard gate, raising her head to look at my car as I passed.

I parked the car and left it running. I remember how bright the headlights seemed compared to the gentle glow of the full moon over the fields. I banged on the front door of the farmhouse until a light went on. A few seconds later, the door was opened by farmwife in a nightgown. Her hair was dyed a cheap black and although it was flattened on one side, it had the stiffness of a coif thick with hairspray. She stood squinting at me with a mixture of defensiveness and confusion.

“Are your cows supposed to be in the cemetery?” I asked. I didn’t think they were, but Vermont has strange customs that even now I stumble upon with surprise.

She stepped out onto the porch where I was standing and squinted even more, aiming her gaze at the cemetery across the street. “Oh dear Lord!” she said, when she saw the herd enjoying their liberty above the sleeping generations of the parish.

”Mort!” she shouted into the house, in the general direction of the stairway behind her. “Mort, the cow’s are out!” Hastily, she thanked me as she ran back inside.

I got in my car and drove on, my headlights weaving against the shadows.

Somewhere, in a Robert Frost poem I can’t find, he wrote about the New England custom of pre-digging graves in late Fall. This is more practical than morbid. The ground here freezes to about 5 feet down in the winter. In the old days, and even now, it’s not always possible to dig six feet under. So they guess how many people will die over the next months, dig the graves and then cover them with tarps, waiting. Anybody who dies too late in the season, once all the graves are filled, just gets put on ice.

At least that’s how they used to do it. But Frost (who lived a few miles from here) makes the point that the unspecified graves make everyone a little nervous, a little cautious. Whose graves will they be?

What I wondered, as I drove away, was what would have happened if one of the cows had walked across the tarp, falling into one of the pre-dug graves. If she’d broken her leg, would that have had to shoot her? And having shot her, would they have simply buried her there, amongst the good Christian folk? Or would they have hoisted her, dead and limp, or alive and indignant, out onto the grass? If she was fine, would she have walked away with an angry swish and forgotten the whole thing? Or would she have been scarred for life, yielding sour milk, fussing at the milking hose?

Maybe Frost wrote about that, somewhere, in another poem that I can't find.