Confessions of a serial mower - travels with mum

Kitty B set me thinking the other day. Her blog discussed cremation as opposed to burial and it is a dilemma we all have to face in one form or another I guess. Either in advance for ourselves or when the inevitable happens for a relative.

I have a fear of fire and thus I have instructions in my will that I want to be buried in the churchyard attached to the pretty Church of my birth village. Many late family members are resting there after their agricultural toils; great grandparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. As a family we have travelled all over but we seem to come to rest back in our beloved Suffolk village. Farming is very like that, you need to get back to your roots, in dry soil preferably under a spreading chestnut tree. We are a bit obsessed with chestnuts in our family. It is the name of my paternal farm, Chestnut Tree Farm.
When I was born one Christmas Day, a sweet chestnut was planted to commemorate this momentous event and it thrives today, tall and spreading and pink, on the farm.

Mum, now she was born in a tiny cottage in the village where we now live. She had no desire to be buried and this left us in somewhat of a quandary. “ What to do with mother”! She left no written express wish.
I inherited her very warped and macabre sense of humour and I am sure she has a wry smile about her now as she watches over me from wherever she is today. I say that not in jest, but because she could be, well, anywhere. Upon her passing much debate (polite word for it) ensued. I took tea with the Vicar, a modern, forward thinking man. He had spent many hours with mum during her last days, and he gave me some very sound advice. Whatever you do, he said, “scatter her to the four winds” if you want, but if you do you will never have a place to come back to. He added he had come across it time and again, after a while you will need a place to return to, a place to chat, to leave flowers, to just be with her.

Mum is now a very well travelled lady. Her ashes are indeed buried in said Churchyard with a little marble plaque and vase so I can visit her whenever I want and place some flowers and have a chat. But not all of her. Some are here with us at our home in a special little box. Some are scattered with her beloved mum and dad in our Churchyard here, the village of her birth.
The remainder are floating somewhere in the blue green warm waters off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico, scattered off our favourite barrier island, where dolphins play and manatees swim, and the sand is white and children scream and frolic in the gentle waves. She is forever on vacation. She never was in life; she rarely rested or ever had a holiday. She worked and worked and mothered and cared, all her waking hours.
She was planning to come with us to our secret island the year she died. So, with special permission and a lot of prodding, comments and raised eyebrows from the Customs Men in Miami, she went, safely encased in a jiffy bag, via British Airways. A trip of a lifetime. A trip after a lifetime.