Spring, gravely

Today was gorgeous and R wanted to go do something outside.  We ended up driving round the country outside of Madison and it was beautiful.  We drove through small towns, great ugly suburban sprawl, sun-shaded valleys, and county roads guarded by gnarly old trees.

I stopped at a small cemetary on top of a hill.  From there, we could see the countryside; the farms isolated in a sea of barren fields, tree-covered ridges spanning the horizon, and cows standing placidly in their pens, heads dipped gracefully towards their feed.

The graves nearer towards the road were relatively new, shiny granite and precisely-chiseled lettering.  The newly naked ground was damp and spongy from the melting snow, exposing the flattened brown grass.  Standing among the graves, I could hear the wind sweeping towards us carrying thawing smells.  It was incredible.

A lot of the older graves were small and nearly illegible.  Some were marked with by rusting cast iron markers like this one:

I'd never seen these kind of grave markers before, so it was a morbid sort of excitement.  R found a tiny tombstone from 1856.  The woman was eighty when she died; her tombstone was so thin I'm sure that I could have kicked it over.

There were also a handful of  smaller markers for children who had died young, some within the year and most before their fifth birthday.  One particularly eerie marker simply had one date on it, her birth and death clashing together on the same day.

As we explored further into the graveyard, the names changed from Germanic ones like Keller, Mueller, and Klauschen to Irish ones like Ryan and Cosby.  R concluded that this was a Catholic graveyard as opposed a Lutheran one, our original theory. 

We finished up our exploration and walked to the front of the cemetary.  Flanked by a weeping Mary and an unknown woman, a life-size Jesus crucified on the cross looked up ruefully towards the sky. In front of this was a small cement step to kneel on and pray.  Their stone expressions of guilt, sorrow, and anguish meant little to us on this beautiful day.

As we headed towards the car, a pink granite tombstone caught our attention.  It was nestled on a bed of pebbles and half-circled by cream flatrock bricks.  Etched on the front was an infant with the incription "To all the innocent victims of Abortion.  From the Knights of Colombus."  R snorted quietly as I rolled my eyes.  We started the car, drove down the hill, and back to the main road that lay at the foot of the hill, shiny and black with water streaming from the top.