Sorrow & Hope

To be remembered is our greatest hope when we die, whether that remembrance is due to our achievements or just because we are loved. The need to be remembered is never clearer than when strolling among the dead. Weaving in and out of cemetery stones, feet falling softly among the dearly departed, it is impossible not to remember them and wonder who they were. I love the idle peace of tracing script with fingertips and wondering how the dash between two numbers was spent.
I recently found myself among the dead in a number of cemeteries, photographing epitaphs and statuary, details of shells and flowers and leaves curving against monuments. When I looked at the pictures later, two faces emerged.

Sorrow

Head in hands, sorrow holds vigil over the graves of those gone too soon. Those who weren't ready to go, or placed there by those who weren't ready to let them leave. Over time, weather either shadows them, making them more stark and desperate. Or it erodes the tension and leaves a smoother, reluctantly accepting visage in its wake. Who could blame these anguished faces for their permanent mourning of what was lost? I looked into their faces and saw myself, the lines wearily etched into stone, marble - cold and unyielding. I saw their downcast eyes, knowing they had cried from heartbreak, from loneliness, from desperately wanting to change the unchangeable. I wanted to lean against them and give them my mourning, to let my agony over losing Kudzu fall into smooth white arms.

Hope

Serenely, they stand or kneel over the bodies of those gone before us, hands clasped in devoted prayer. Some of them bow reverently; others tip faces upward toward the light. Their faces are bathed in an ethereal glow, their eyes are knowing. These stone creatures have foregone their mourning and looked to the light, relinquished their woe and wreathed themselves in hope. Weather-smoothed faces look ever more placid or seem to be disappearing as though the predetermined time of protection is up and they, too, are melting into a vague half-state. Hope sometimes comes with angel wings, folded quietly behind or poised, ready to fly upward.

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.

Ash's Obsessions du Jour

Tagged by Pen - here we go.

1. Noticing. Everything. Contemplating the light through the windows in the apartment in the late afternoon. Considering Kudzu's regular patterns of movement from room to room and neat jumps onto the windowsills. Ways of getting from one place to the other in town, recognizing the acute knowledge of each curve and straight and landmark - I know this road. Wondering (but trying not to overly much) if this will be the last time I do this or that in Wilmywood before I move. Noticing. Everything.

2. Quiet solitude. Not that quiet is the way anyone would describe me - prone to nervous chatter as I am and filling silences with it. And generally talking too much and too loudly. But today is quiet, and I relish the quiet and hold the quiet.

3. Oakdale Cemetery. Having never been there until yesterday, I was unaware that it holds the esteem of being quite possibly the only place in Wilmywood that I might describe as "hilly." Any other season, it might be drab - naked wintry branches or fully-leaved summer trees. But in spring, it is blossoming and fragrant and serene.

4. Songs that I hear that have a confusing context. How sometimes The Killers' "Smile Like You Mean It" sounds like a song Kim and I would've listened to in the car on the way to the beach, even though it came out after we graduated. Or how The Fray's "How to Save a Life" feels impossibly like a song from college that I would've listened to on repeat going up Stretch Road and hummed to myself as I rattled around Frost Chapel.

5. Kudzu's relentlessness in waking me these days when he wants to be fed. His pawing the covers off me and wet nose on the eyelids. He drives me mad until I stumble into the kitchen and crack open a can. But then, after he's eaten and I've gone back to bed, he'll curl up against my spine in a tight circle and I feel loved.

6. My secret day off. I hedged about going home for Easter because I selfishly wanted a three-day weekend to myself. Other than my sister, sworn to secrecy, my family thinks today was just another day at the office.