Today's post brought to you by the Gale Free Library: no cemeteries out back, but apparently I won't be troubled by wind storms as I type. Gale Free is in Holden; I walked here from my grandparents' house. It is the library my mother would have eggheaded in as a shy youth elite. (In which she would have eggheaded...)
Last night I wandered through the Rutland cemetery; today I wandered through two in Holden. And now I want to talk about dead babies. In Taos, the graves of young children were heart-wrenching. Among the clocked-in-the-noggin' adult graves were tiny graves of children, often decorated with lambs or mobiles or--the most crushing--surrounded by wrought iron in the form of a crib. The child graves I saw today were either part of a family plot (we're talking graves dating from the 1680s to current) or tidy ones on their own. I most like the family plots, where one headstone serves the entire group. It makes it look like the entire family was taken down due to a rampant disease or Lizzy Borden...which, considering the dates, could be potentially true. Linking yesterday and today together, it seems that in the desert I think about the survivors of the deceased, those who wander through and place plastic flowers or medals of remembrance on the graves; in New England I think about the deceased themselves: in what manner they died and what they'd been eating beforehand.
Grove Cemetery was pretty big and each through street or path was named after a tree. I took a picture of the one called "Hemlock" and decided that everyone buried on that lane had been poisoned. Luckily, there's no one around to tell me I'm wrong...at least not until the witching hour.
In the words of the four-year-old leaving the Rutland Library: "People got dead in there."
Posted by Ida at April 23, 2004 12:17 PMCA-RAZY
Posted by: erin at April 23, 2004 05:33 PM