You may have noticed some photos here of cemeteries.  I’ve liked them as long as I can remember.  Around here, many are up on hills overlooking the other hills, maybe a town down below.  Rochester has two beautiful cemeteries.  I tried to go to one in Warrenton (OR) one day, winding through back roads near Fort Stevens Park, but it was chained and padlocked.  I never made it back.

Mount Hope  (Rochester) was the first municipally-owned Victorian cemetery in the United States, started in 1839 I believe.  There is a kettel in it from glacier days, full of dark water.  Then the land was a primeval forest (what a great term) with wild boar running around, literally until pioneers settled in the 1700’s and ate them.

I have no fascination with death.  It’s the stories behind the stones that interest me.  Walking through a cemetery, aside from it being peaceful with just the breeze rustling leaves, gives me a sense of history and ancestry.  Names on the granite markers could very well be names that I’ll recognize at a village meeting next week or a name of a town (like Gaston, Oregon) or a well-known business.  In this cemetery (Belmont) over by the fence, a freed slave--a woman--is buried next to a Civil War soldier.

Those who visited Spirited Wine & Art may remember my Halloween display in the store, based on Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology.   The poems in the book are voices of the ghosts, the names on the head stones, the townspeople of Spoon River, Illinois.  Secrets and regret, justice and love, all intertwined in families, events and tragedies. 

One of my favorites is “George Gray,” but I think I’ll post “William Goode” with more fall color photos…

To all in the village I seemed, no doubt,

To go this way and that way, aimlessly,

But here by the river you can see at twilight

The soft-winged bats fly zig-zag here and there---

They must fly so to catch their food.

And if you have ever lost your way at night,

In the deep wood near Miller’s Ford,

And dodged this way and now that,

Wherever the light of the Milky Way shone through,

Trying to find the path,

You should understand I sought the way

With earnest zeal, and all my wanderings

Were wanderings in the quest.