Reflections on the Sixth Week of Fall

      Halloween morning, Steve Curwood, of the Living on Earth radio show, enticed me with “In a moment, a walk through a living cemetery.”

      Living cemetery? Did he mean spooky spirits rising?

      The story featured Mount Auburn, a garden cemetery in Boston. As birds sang in the background, naturalists John Harrison and Kim Nagy discussed resident hawks and owls. Historical novelist William Martin said, “Stories are everywhere . . . Beneath every marker and atop every monument.”

      Steve inspired me to see what life and stories I could find in a cemetery on Halloween. Spence volunteered to walk with me through Milledgeville Cemetery.

      Spruce trees, bushes, leafless cherries, and bare maples edged the grounds.  Blue jays called, and a flock of small birds, too high to identify, chirped. Partridge berries, moss, lichens, hardy green plants with long pointed leaves, and freshly cut grass grew among the gravestones. Only plastic or marble flowers bloomed.

      Looking for stories, we ambled among early settlers, Civil War soldiers, and Millennials. Johnathan, who died at nineteen in 2013, rested under guitar and computer carvings, wind chimes, a can of Guinness, and two empty bottles of Yuengling Lager. Turkeys and deer posed on the rural scene carved on Ted's gravestone. Had he been a hunter? Wedding rings and years of marriages connected couples' names on stones from the second half of the 1900s. Headstones from the 1800s listed the death date and death age in years, months, and days. Doing the math, we discovered a lot of infants and that many wives and sisters had died younger than husbands and brothers. I suspected childbirth, but Spence speculated the women had led hard lives. With a 1799 birth year, Sarah was the oldest with a readable headstone. Carvings on older stones had faded. Weathering also tilted markers, twisted stones on bases, knocked ornaments off monument tops, and added lichens.

      Spence and I didn't find as much living as Steve Curwood had on his cemetery walk, but we'd found more stories. Instead of spooky Halloween spirits, we'd met former Milledgeville neighbors who'd walked the same roads and fields as we now walk.