Tag: cemetery

Satyrdaz Wandering Thoughts

While going to the coffee shop, I often pass a cemetery. Not surprising as Ashland has three.

This one is the original. Located just off East Main Street, it sits beside some of the town’s oldest neighborhoods, including the Railroad District.

I often glance at the cemetery while driving by, looking for deer. Deer often visit the cemetery, grazing and digesting between grave markers.

A few weeks ago, I noticed teenagers gathering in the cemetery. Once was a curiosity, twice was a surprise, three times is a trend. They did this for several weeks, regardless of sunshine, freezing fall, or rain and drizzle.

We’re not addressing a few teens; usually ten to eighteen gather, typically a few minutes after eleven AM. I wonder, what’s going on there, and at what grave are they gathering?

Here’s the kicker, though. School is out for the winter break. The children are not gathering. Instead, that same gravestone was host to five deer. I kid you not.

I really need to stop by and see the name on that grave.

0

Saturday Afternoon at the Cemetery

A couple flirted, giggled, and kissed on a blanket under the cemetery pines while a woman sat on a towel, eating an apple and reading, in a splash of sunshine twenty yards away. Dozens of grave markers from them, a trio of fawns bucked and gamboled. A pair of does ate while a grave majestic buck chewed in thought. A gray squirrel, egged on by cawing crows and jeering jays, chased another squirrel around and up trees and over headstones as a flock of wild turkeys tsked, sighed, and tutted.

It was a lively place to be, in the cemetery that day.

0

Color

Red, white, and yellow peered out from the covers of foggy drizzle and gray sky, an aberration among the bare trees and stolid grave markers, calling to him out of their difference. Swinging that way, he strode past the long dead, eyes mostly on the colors, finding a small, cheery snowman in the decorations of poinsettias, daisies and lilies, along with a petite bluebird of happiness.

Reaching the stones, he stared down at them for a few seconds. He’d expected recent deaths, but none of those were recent. Grandfather and father, side-by-side, born seventeen years apart, had died in the early nineties. Grandmother – “I’m just taking a little nap” – was born in 1929 and passed in 2006. She was the most recent.

Son and brother, never forgotten, had been born the same year as him, 1956, but the dead man had preceded him by a few months. Son and brother had passed in 1974, the same year he’d graduated high school, the same year that he’d joined the military. He noticed son and brother was exactly eighteen years old when he died.

Nothing told him about their lives and deaths, nor why the graves had been visited, or who visited them. A recent windstorm had knocked some of the flowers over. Water filled the fake plants’ pots. He emptied the water, set everything upright, and arranged the flowers.

His journey was resumed, nothing learned. It was just a little color on a dreary winter day, a short break in the accumulation of miles.

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑