It was more common to meet the dead in the spring.

It is not even a road, but an asphalted path, going up from the Cheremshanskaya stop through the Ogonyok Park to the red two-story brick houses. You used to hear about this road from people of exactly the elderly (military generation). Often on this road they met friends who lived in other cities, walking among the locals from the bus stop. But they saw them far away and did not meet anyone afterwards, friends who lived far away were scattered among the rest of the people. They saw deceased relatives, friends passing by and not recognizing them, not noticing them. The dead would dissolve into the air near red houses with a crack in the whole house. Sometimes they went into that crack. Those who had already died walked either thoughtfully, immersed in their thoughts, or with a joyful smile on their face. It was more common to meet the dead in the spring.

My babysitter, a neighbor two houses away, met a childhood friend of hers who had long since died. She was wearing an unusually beautiful dress of her time and young age. The girl was catching butterflies and picking dandelions. My grandfather, before he died, saw an acquaintance of his walking down this road, whom he had sold a Moskvich, and who had died a year before. My great-grandmother used to meet long-dead neighbors from her village. No one ever stopped at her dead, being in some kind of stupor. And no one ever followed them to the crack on the house.

Recently, too, I had to meet my dead grandmother on this road. But it happened in the winter. She was walking in her winter coat and with two bags full of groceries, just like when she worked in the store and everything was on coupons. In these bags she carried groceries to my uncle's family and ours. She put them down, took a breath, as she always did, but didn't notice me.

When I, pushing other people aside, tried to run up to my grandmother, I did not meet her, seeing her behind me, already walking toward the red houses. Sometimes I think it was just a woman who looked like her. But meeting the living and the dead on her, especially before, among the old men, was a frequent occurrence. So I wasn't really surprised. My mother saw a dead relative, her cousin's husband, very often. Sometimes she saw him from a distance, sometimes up close, walking past him. They never said hello. And my mother explained to herself that she was just seeing someone who looked alike. But such encounters were too frequent among the locals to simply count as coincidence and similarity of people.

During the Perestroika era, when they first built the church, you could meet a beggarly old man on it who didn't ask for anything, but predicted the future. He predicted me quite correctly two lives by pointing to a double rainbow in the sky. All his predictions came true. They say he didn't tell everyone, but chose who he told. Some of them he just spat in his wake.

Now this road was left behind the wall of the monastery. And behind the fence there is a new walkway. Whether it will be possible to meet the dead even for two seconds - nobody knows .. The strangest thing is that the natives continue to walk to the bus stop on the old road, although the asphalt on it has already crumbled, and the new flat, fresh asphalt road is empty.

In my memory, this road through a spring park with young green grass, whitened trees, going to the red cracks on the two-story houses will always remain..