Graveyard Shift

While I claim W-ville as my home town, the truth is that I was born in Tennessee, just over the border. For the first few years of my life, I lived in a little town just east of Lookout Mountain in the midst of the Appalachian foothills.

Mom and I went up that way yesterday for her to close out the probate on my step grandmother's will. I thought we'd have lunch, drive around a bit, stop by the courthouse, and so I wore my new four-inch black suede open-toed wedges. Because I didn't know that Mom was going to decide to do the tour de graveyards during our trip. After the first stop, I begged her to stop at Wal-Mart and buy me a pair of $1.94 flip flops.

We traipsed through three different graveyards, and Mom pointed out to me the graves of her parents and their parents - generations of Martins and Williams. We traced along the rows of stones the siblings and children of the same names, coming across one stone with a lamb atop it with the inscription "Budded on earth and bloomed in heaven." The last of the three graveyards was on a hill that overlooked a valley backed on the other side by the steep upsweep of a ridge. I stood, squinting across the way and thinking that it was a peaceful spot to be laid eternally. Here were the stones I'd most anticipated, the legendary great, great uncles named by their mother Willie Lowry with outrageous names like Vandell (whose first initials were W.F., though I know not for what they stand) and Montezuma Elmo, whose wife Rosa Nell was laid to rest at his side. Story goes that Rosa Nell was a bit unhinged and yelled at the children who rode bikes past her house while waving a butcher knife from the porch. Unfortunately for me, their brother Prudential Leffell and sister Zenta are buried elsewhere.

I'm not that informed about the generations proceeding me on either side of the family, other than knowing that for at least of few generations back, the general northwest corner of Georgia bleeding into Tennessee was home. And maybe that's why I could never settle down in the flat coastal plain. Something in my blood needed the rise and fall of the land, to be caught in a valley with a thin ribbon of sky overhead and nowhere to go but in between. Mom and I talked yesterday about how it's not really home anymore in the literal sense, but if you're talking about everafter, we wouldn't mind calling it that.