COUNTRY CEMETERIES

While working on a photographic collage recently, I uncovered pictures that I took a decade ago. One 8 by 10, in black and white, shows a broken marble tombstone in an old country graveyard. The name and dates are hard to read. The stone is nearly cracked in two and is lying on the ground at an angle.

I remember the day. A walk with a neighbor overland through cornfields to a now abandoned family burying ground. At the time, the marker caught my eye and tugged at my heart. To this day, I am intrigued by strolling among marble reminders of lives that were. It makes me think about my own life. It had a beginning. It, too, will have an end. There’s no such thing as forever. Sometimes we forget that.

No matter how beautiful the carving. Regardless of the quality of the sculpture. Even if we wish it were not so. One day our life on earth will be done and we will lie beneath our own cold stone. Not long after, our names, too will be largely forgotten.

Sometimes this thought makes me unbearably sad. Once, walking in Concord in a little cemetery on a long-ago Saturday morning, I saw dates that indicated the grave of a small child. That seemed to me to be a life whose flame was too soon extinguished.

At other times the stones are reminders. “Life is precious”. “Don’t wish away today.” “Tomorrow is not guaranteed.” They whisper. When I hear these admonitions, I try to appreciate the beauty in the mundane and look around to see all that this life can offer if I will but take the time to notice.

Once upon a time every family farm had its own burial ground like the one where we walked. The benevolent souls of departed relatives might have been as near as the back wood lot. To me that would be far preferable than being plunked at the end of a row in some manicured city cemetery. I’d far rather take my final rest at the end of the lane beneath the giant oak tree or in the woodsy clearing near the artesian springs where the ground is red clay.

It doesn’t matter much, I suppose. I doubt it’s like OUR TOWN where the ghosts of the dead chat to each other in the still of the night. When we die, reminders of our sojourn here won’t mean much, I believe, as we “fly away” to a new life.

"THE ARCHES" BOOK-THE LITTLE TOWN THAT DID

This is a local story of perseverance and service and community-mindedness. The citizens of Post-WWII Springport, Michigan volunteered their money and their labor to build a community building/gym that was the talk of Jackson County. Their effort took two years.

Farmers donated trees from their wood lots and sawed them on a mill at the building site. Working with their own tractors and trucks, local teachers and businessmen, doctors and gas station owners hauled gravel and dug footings and mixed concrete and laid block. They did their own wiring and they set the roof of the building with massive arches that came from Wisconsin in halves on the train, each weighing 3,600 pounds. The local women fed the volunteers who worked mainly on Sundays.

The book includes indices of all who donated money, all who donated labor and all the women who brought food to feed the workers.

http://springportschools.net/NEW/arches.html- for ordering info

OR

http://www.aberdeenbay.com/published.aspx

Philosophy

No day we live’s a guarantee.
No future’s ours to plan.
We’re all just lonely wanderers.
We do the best we can.

Choose love instead of hatred.
Choose peace instead of war.
Choose beauty over ugliness.
Or what’s our living for?

MOSQUITOES

They're drawn like tiny bomers
to the breath that I exhale.
They buzz around me in a cloud.
Their one thought? To impale.

I hunch my shoulders, bless my hat
and hide each inch of skin.
Yet, undeterred, they circle
and seek a pathway in.

WALKING THE LABYRINTH

The soft circles draw my feet.
The path is forgiving.

My breathing slows.
The journey is my focus,
Rather than the destination.

Like onion layers, my worries peel away,
And, in the rose-shaped center, there
My open mind itself is prayer.

Old Barns Becoming Memories

The old red barn across the street from us is a pile of rubble now . At first it was just listing to the side. One day the roof gave way. Now it is caving in upon itself. Soon it will be just a sodden mass of weathered boards where once a functional structure stood proudly.

It’s a real shame. I fear the old wooden barns, beautiful buildings in their own right, are going the way of the barn owl. They are getting scarcer and scarcer as the years roll on.

These barns are treasures. The Michigan Barn Preservation Network calls them “economic resources and symbols of our agricultural heritage”. I believe there is no more attractive image than a well-kept, freshly painted barn, surrounded by white fences, stolidly occupying the space between planted fields and wooded hedgerows and housing the various farm implements necessary to work the land.

I also find it ludicrous that we cannot insure our own barn for enough money to rebuild even a tiny corner of it. Of course, in reality, a pole barn is more efficient. It can store more stuff. It is easier to maintain. But it lacks the charm of the hand-hewn beams, the solid oak floor, and the multi-roomed layout of a barn built near the turn of last century.

I love to stand inside our barn on a rainy day and hear the sound of raindrops on the steel roof. My husband has room for all his projects in its spacious basement layout. Up above, we can store garden supplies and weights and rabbit cages, old doors and outgrown bicycles, and still have room to pull the tractor in. In the summer, the swallows return and build their mud nests under the high eaves.

I have so many vivid memories of that barn, including:
-Climbing up the wood ladder some forty feet to see fireworks out the top window
-Sitting with the kids watching Rocket, the calf, be born
-Watching tiny reddish piglets snuggle under the heat lamp
-Playing Ping Pong in the hay mow
-Staying away from the mean rooster who was prone to attack you as your head emerged when you climbed the basement stairs
-Filling up the loft with square hay bales while visiting cousins helped
-Holding my breath as Rick dangled aloft and ripped off two layers of shingles
-Using the South wall as a huge screen for Kara’s wedding powerpoint

Though our own barn is no longer filled with the soft breath of animals, it remains as a tribute to another way of life-a time when a small farmer, owner of a couple of hundred acres, willing to work hard, could earn a decent living from the land for the family.

A butterfly stops for a moment on a toppling concrete tombstone
In a country graveyard
On a dappled Sunday afternoon.

The span of human life is so-
We live and wither and fade away

So too do the markers that call others to remember.

But our faith holds strong
In life or death,
We are a part of a family of believers…

We know that, saved by grace,
We will find more in the life beyond.
The best is yet to come.