Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen includes among its amenities the grave of this perennially popular author.
Jack's wife Charmian placed his ashes under this rock when he died in 1916 at age 40. She asked that her own ashes be placed there also, when the time came. Her wish was carried out.
Many lizards live on this site. There is a nearly invisible one in the picture above, blending with the upward curve of the right-hand side of the rock. This same lizard is fully visible below, communing with the essences of Jack and Charmian.
They are all over the grave plot, these lizards.
About fifty feet away from the London Shrine is another, earlier grave site. Two pioneer children are buried, with rough carved wooden headstones. Looming over them is an enormous pine (in a forest of live oak and madrone) and my friend and I guessed that the pine had been planted to commemorate the burial of the children, well more than a century ago. How uncanny to witness the parents' love embodied in a soaring living tree, long after all the participants in that love are dead.