2 Bitter 4 Words

Author notes

graves

LilyRose

on March 2, 2007

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Okay, this is the story


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I was walking through the woods; it was a mid-autumn day, most of the leaves down and drying on the forest floor. Where I live, there are no old growth forests; things have gone through their cycles here. The signs of those who were and are no more are everywhere. Low stone walls marking fields that have long since gone back to Hemlock and Spruce, or Maple, or Hickory and Birch. Crumbled foundations of granite or bluestone blocks, now filled with stands of young trees. Rusting, unidentifiable pieces of farm equipment and machine parts, woven into the tapestry of the woods with filament of root and vine. Nature takes back its own. That's a lesson you learn every day.

In a small clearing, at the edge of a bluff high above a wide, shallow creek, I stumbled upon this collection of marked graves. By the names chiseled - hand-chiseled in the oldest - into the stones, it was clearly an old family burial ground. The newest gravestones were only a couple of decades old; the oldest ones were weathered into near-illegibility.

It was a quiet spot, fragrant with pine. It had that desolate beauty of the dying season; the bones of the world showing through, black and sharp, the tree's fallen brown flesh crackling dry underfoot. If the spirits of those interred here were enjoying the peaceful solitude of this hidden place, as I was; if they were gathered at the bluff to gaze out at the rolling blue hills in the distance; I felt it not.

Like many people who share a certain sensibility, a certain… inner nature; I have always been drawn to cemeteries, crypts, mausoleums, tombs - and in my case, a particular fondness for simple country graveyards. I have worked in them, walked in them, meditated in them, passed my lunch breaks in them, and even slept in them, wrapped in a sleeping bag and huddled in the lee of a wind-sheltering stone.

I have felt the powerful energies that can surround these places like an aura, but not once have I ever sensed that this energy was the life-force of some dearly departed soul. Not once, in my long history of taphophilia (yes, boys and girls: there is a word for it), have I ever felt the presence of a ghost.

I suspect that the energies that fill these places with their subliminal hum, are more likely the issue of the wellspring of sorrow, and need, and loss, that people bring with them, and pour out like libations onto hallowed ground. The earth soaks it up; it informs the very being of what these places are.

And in some, lonely, near-forgotten spots like this one, even that energy has crystallized, gone back to its component parts, much like the dust and ashes of those buried here, whose lives once lived are not even memories anymore….


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