Entry 8

It would be easy to make a correlation between the cemetery and springtime; rebirth, what is dead once more come to life, et cetera. It would be even easier to make these connections today, on Easter, a holiday celebrating resurrection, and on Passover, celebrating release, regeneration, beginning things anew. But if there's anything I've learned from these past three and a half months abiding with this cemetery, it's this: connections, and the meanings we make from them, don't come, can't come, easily. To force these metaphors would be to homogenize this place sparkling with diversity, to assume a consistency and predictability of the seasons, to flatten out the experiences of all those tens of thousands of dead buried here--to do a disservice to their lives.

April 18, and almost all the trees are in leaf and bloom. A blessing of green washes through me. Here's the tall silver maple clustered with golden flower buds; the scarlet oak with its young leaves like viridescent starbursts; pink dogwood, branches curved upward like the outstretched arms and curled fingers, at the tip of each digit a four-petaled blossom; and the evergreens, still here, stalwart as ever, like Viking pioneers who have outbraved the siege of winter.

April 18, and the trees are in leaf and bloom, and some have begun shedding petals, dusting the grass and pathways that now look like the aisles of a wedding chapel. Far too early.

We've all been reading about how spring has sprung weeks earlier than usual across the country this year, in stubborn defiance of Punxsutawney Phil's predictions. Snowdrops barely had a few days to bow their heads in a show of grace to the passing of winter before a wild nor'easter hit. They didn't stand a chance. Time is out of joint, and I hesitate to believe that this is the new normal--to do so would mean giving in to the admittedly enticing oblivion of apathy. But I wonder how much we'll ever be able to rely on the regularity of seasonal changes again, how sure we can be of that cycle, rooted deep in our most primal imaginations, of death and rebirth.

I've been amazed at my ability to restrain myself from overly morbid or macabre ruminations on the cemetery and the corpses six feet beneath everywhere I tread, and my ability to avoid any death-related puns (well, perhaps a concession was given to the blog's title), especially taking into account my repeated reflections on crows without ever using the word "murder." But the truth is, I wasn't necessarily actively avoiding these easily usable and abusable tropes--they never really even came to mind. For me, my perambulations became acts of intense witnessing--of the city, of the wild, and of the great difficulty that lies in attempting to separate the two. I feel that my inquiries into the history of the cemetery aren't that far removed from this witnessing, either, for in examining this distinction (which is ultimately more semantic than ontological), I also consider the distinction between "history" and "natural history." Over the semester, my inquiries, then, into the natural history of the cemetery have taken into account flora and fauna, yes, but also people, the human manipulation of and engagement with place (and time), and the necessity of integrating humanity, even if this only means our own writerly bodies, into our meditations on the environment. Perhaps this comes from repeated explorations of a place situated within a dense urban center, or perhaps it comes from being increasingly, acutely aware of the human-engendered disruptions in our climate, but--even through observations of deer and crows, spruce and holly, goose and rabbit--it is impossible for me to extricate the human from the inhuman.

Stillness and staying put; watching, listening, reading what's written on stone and in moss--these are skills I know I've sharpened over the course of writing this journal. Awareness, too, and over time, a sense of belonging, to a place both alien and familiar. Pittsburgh being the city in which I grew up, I began to feel a kind of intimacy or kinship with this place, bodily, even; a sense that my own history is rooted in this soil. I learned more about the city's history through this cemetery than I ever did the first eighteen years of my life here. I believe this came less from my own personal investment in historical research than from an absorption in the task of ingesting, digesting the environment around me.

In communing with the cemetery, I became part of its community. Connections elude us. But I revel in that elusiveness. I celebrate the difficulty that lies in making sense of things, in the recklessness of metaphor. We can feel for those collusions, conspirings of sense and story. It's the work of feeling out that counts. Feeling for the links (even the broken ones) that bind me to birch bark and willow, gravel and grass. To the yellow feathers of the flicker, the sistrum-rattle of chestnut leaves as it alights on a pliant bough.

These sounds are enough; this song is enough; there are stories there. Go, write them down.

Entry 7

As it's a beautiful, mild early spring day, I decide to walk from my home in Shadyside to Allegheny Cemetery, in Lawrenceville. It's a walk that takes me through East Liberty, Friendship, and Bloomfield—neighborhoods that either didn't exist in or were distinct villages from Pittsburgh at the time the cemetery was established in 1844. Originally free grazing land east of Pittsburgh, East Liberty (a "liberty" being a plot of common land) developed into its own town thanks to the commercial and infrastructural efforts of Negleys, Mellons, and Winebiddles, family names that have since become ingrained in the geography as well as imaginary of Pittsburgh. Friendship and Bloomfield were once streetcar suburbs, after the Winebiddle clan divided and sold off plots of land to develop into rowhouses and, later, larger houses for more prosperous families. Lawrenceville itself was founded by William Foster, father of the famous Stephen Foster, Allegheny Cemetery's most famous resident. The two-and-a-half-mile journey to the Butler Street gatehouse is a journey through the city's history, the seamless meetings of neighborhoods today belying the fact that, once, there were open fields here, empty plots of land where both industry executives and industrial workers made their homes, when the iron and coal began to pour in and the steel began to ship out.

While the trees in the city have yet to fully leaf, many are in bloom. The dogwoods with their thousands of tiny, four-petaled white flowers, the pastel pink of weeping cherries. The red maples have already shed their crimson flowers, now sticky and bloated, littering sidewalks and catching in the treads of my sneakers. The faint yellow of poplar blooms are giving way to early leafs, oblong, the size of thumbnails. Bright, sporadic splashes of color in the afternoon sun. Clusters of tiny red berries dangle from the wild cherry trees planted along the sidewalks of Liberty Avenue, berries that will drop and rot, uneaten, come autumn.

In a book on Allegheny Cemetery published by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Association, I discovered that, a few months ago, I had misidentified the grave of Margaretta Bayard Briggs, the cemetery's first interment. The picture in the book does not look the same as the grave I had believed was hers, so I'm on a hunt to find the right one. Surely I'm not the first person to misidentify the dead—voiceless, so many headstones effaced by time and weather. Families, joggers, cyclists, and amateur photographers have all come for an afternoon jaunt in this wide, quiet green space, now that the sun is out and there's not yet enough pollen in the air to stir up allergies. I climb to the top of a hill in the oldest part of the cemetery, Lot 2, where Margaretta is buried (I found the "impostor" Margaretta in Lot 1). It's a large and densely populated lot, and I have a hard time finding the right stone, but eventually I find the Bayard plot and Margaretta's small, rococo stone. In the picture in the book, the engraving on the stone is still legible—not so today. In the twenty-seven years since the book's publication, the text on the stone is all but erased. I feel an odd kind of sympathy both with and for Margaretta, her worn stone, no plaque to mark the significance of her grave as there is for every one of the past mayors of Pittsburgh buried here. I wonder who the last person was to purposefully seek her out, to spend time with her here.

Other Bayards are buried here, too, and there's a wide, shiny new headstone beside Margaretta's that I suspect was commissioned recently by whoever remains of the Bayards, commemorating the members of that apparently illustrious family. This being originally Col. George Bayard's farmland, I suppose they have a right to do so. Remarkably, however, none of the Bayards listed on this stone are actually buried here, save Margaretta, whose name is carved in clear, crisp lettering.

The scion of the "de Bayard" line, it would seem, was Pierre Terrail de Bayard, identified on the stone as "Chevalier Sans Peur et Sans Reproche" ("The Knight Without Fear and Beyond Reproach"), 1473-1524. An Internet search reveals that de Bayard was, in fact, a remarkably accomplished, chivalrous, and all around well-liked knight with who served three kings and is buried in France. A medieval French knight honored, here, in Lawrenceville. Also listed on the stone is Col. Stephen Adams Bayard, 1744-1815 (whom one would presume fought in the Revolutionary War), and the founder of Elizabeth, PA, thirteen miles south of Pittsburgh on the shore of the Monongahela. Beside him, his wife, Elizabeth Mackey Bayard, after whom he named the town, and identified as the "First White Child Born in Fort Pitt" in 1767. I wonder about this clarification, "White," and who, then, was really the first child born in what would become Pittsburgh—an African child? Native American? Or what would have been called a "mestizo" or "mulatto"? And where do they lie buried, unmarked, unnamed?

The loud, rhythmic call of a bird I do not recognize startles me out of my reverie. I look around at the many trees around me and spot what looks like a woodpecker gripping the trunk of a bare-branched oak. It lets out the call again—wik-wik-wik-wik—and another bird swoops in toward it, and they both fly up into the tree's branches. I walk closer to get a better look, but they keep flitting from tree to tree, calling loudly all the while. Then, they both spread their wings and soar right over my head, and I almost gasp as I catch sight of their cadmium-yellow bellies and underwings, a color I don't think I've ever seen before in nature, banded with dark brown. With the help of the handy "Merlin" smartphone app, I identify the bird as a northern flicker—what a terrific name to match that flickering bright glimpse of their undersides. Some further probing on the website of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology reveals that this particular call is a territorial call heard in the spring and early summer, when pairs are forming and establishing their territories. That would explain the antagonistic chasing about and insistent vocalizations.

I've barely covered any ground on today's walk and have already seen and learned so much. Ahead of me, further into the cemetery, wait a herd of young, bandy-legged deer, geese and mallards wading in the no-longer-frozen ponds, robins scurrying in the green grass. I walk on, hoping to catch another glimpse of the flickers. But it seems they've moved on, staking and battling out the borders of their territories, where they will, for the season, find mates and raise their young. So I leave their province, wishing them the best, hoping I'll meet them again when I least expect. Because it seems that the flicker should always come as a surprise.

Entry 6

Crows are partially migratory birds, meaning that some move south for the winter, and others do not. Crows that live in more northern climes, such as those in Canada, tend to migrate to warmer climes, while those that live in areas that do not experience very extreme winters tend to remain where they are. Those that stay put gather in large communal roosts by the tens of thousands, dispersing to feed during the day and returning at dusk. American crows have begun to increasingly roost in urban areas. It’s not entirely known why, but researchers hypothesize that the light (crows see about as well as humans) helps them to better spot predators.

The mix of local and migratory birds crowds the skyways between November and March. Crows gather among the bare trees, making them look as though they have retained their leaves through the winter. A single tree can hold up to 3,000 crows, each weighing a pound. Roosts near rivers tend to be warmer, as well, with water temperature generally being higher than air temperature. Pittsburgh, with its three rivers and many wooded areas within city limits, is a popular site for roosting crows.

The crows have begun to disperse from the cemetery. Some will make their way to their breeding grounds in New York or the Great Lakes. Some have simply begun to expand their range in the city, shaking the cold from their wings.

Other birds now take their place. The avian cacophony of spring has begun to rear its head as the search for mates begins. Sparrows, omnipresent but largely hidden, leave their tiny footprints behind in the soil newly moistened by snowmelt. Robins (supposed harbingers of spring, but sighted regularly in the city over the winter) rustle among the underbrush, oddly fond of the ground despite their winged bodies. Cardinals flit warily within bushes, skittish at any human approach. Pairs of crimson males and tawny females retreat to more remote brush as I pass by. The bluejay, large and proud with its sapphire crest, releases its astonishingly loud calls, which I often mistake for a hawk’s.

I spot a few red-winged blackbirds, as well. I’ve long considered these birds to be personal good luck charms, tending to appear at moments in my life when I most need a little sign of favor from the cosmos.

Along with my visit to the cemetery this week, I also took a trip to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in an attempt to learn more about birds. It was an odd kind of mirror-world: I visited a place for the dead to observe the living, and visited a place of the living to observe the dead. A bit dim and paneled in dark wood, the Hall of Birds is exactly that, a long hallway, lined on either side with glass display cases of taxidermied bird specimens. Most of these birds are not native to western Pennsylvania, and offer a rare close glimpse at species like the toucan, kiwi, or bald eagle. You can also stare into the glass eyes of more elusive species of raptors and hard-to-spot finches. Absent from the hall, however, are those more common species we see or hear on a daily basis: pigeon, sparrow, crow, robin. It would seem that these species are far too quotidian to merit a place among the stuffed and wire-bound specimens on display. Small children may marvel over the size of an ostrich’s egg, but won’t gaze with an equal amount of wonder at the surprisingly irridescent feathers of columbines, or the sleek nocturnal grace of corvids.

Enough has been written about the mystical properties of birds, and none of it needs to be rehashed here. Creatures of the sky, messengers between worlds. Angels’ wings. The holy dove.

Today, the spring equinox, marks the point in the year when we at last begin to have more sunlight than darkness every day. A halfway point, the fulcrum at which day and night stand equal. It’s an odd kind of day, I’ve always felt, when we’re supposed to celebrate the return of the sun’s reign while most trees remain defoliated and flowers have barely begun to bud. The air stands especially still today. Only the flight of the birds make you realize that there is substance to the stuff, a medium that holds them aloft.

Crows and their cousins in the genus Corvidae are known to mourn. They have been observed gathered around the bodies of their dead in a ring of solemn silence. Some have gone so far to say that crows hold funerals.

I feel, ultimately, that I’ve learned nothing of these birds from either my walk through the cemetery or my trip to the museum. So ubiquitous, and yet so alien. I can only guess at their lives, their thoughts, their sins.

One of those moments passes, strange and bone-chilling, in which all the birds stop singing at once. Silence lasting for a few seconds that seem like hours.

Then the symphony resumes.

Entry 5

March 5th, and it's the first day that truly feels like winter's thaw. This isn't a fluke, one of those freak 36-hour illusions of spring that have been so common this year, that have been causing plants across the northern hemisphere to bud, leaf, and bloom weeks too early. But today, the air hovers comfortably between brisk and lukewarm, the breeze blows gently without the sting of frost. The trees that aren't evergreens still remain bare, but no longer stark--softening, it feels, against the cloudless "blue true dream of sky." Diaphanous, a perfect semicircle of moon hangs midway between the zenith and horizon, enlarged so that I can just barely cover it with my thumb held an arm's length away. It's as if the cemetery is just at the end of a long exhale, almost ready to draw its bright green breath again.

Large banner-like signs have been posted around the grounds that "CLEANUP BEGINS MARCH 1. ALL MEMORIALS AND ORNAMENTS WILL BE REMOVED." All along my peripatetic loop around the cemetery's three hundred acres, small mounds of browning wreaths, adorned with crimson ribbons and holiday ornaments, have piled up beside the roads. Trinkets, too, buried among them--little angels, teddy bears, desiccated flowers the colors of old bruises, and silk flowers gaudy in their insistent tropical hues.

For once, there's not even a hint of snow on the ground today, and these Christmas wreaths seem even more alien among the growing verdure. More than this, I notice even more graves than I ever have before--flagstones centuries old, their engravings effaced by time, and coming close to being overtaken by the grass. Some of them I can't even see until they're nearly underfoot, worn down as they are and almost level with the roots and the worms.

I take a detour up a sloping gravel path I've never seen before. It winds for a short length through a densely wooded section of the cemetery, a thick-piled carpet of dead leaves over the ground. Low, artfully rough-hewn headstones line the path, many bearing the dates of 2015 or 2016. Recent deaths, still fresh, I imagine, in the minds of those who have been left behind. What startles me more, though, are the stones bearing names and only birth years--commissioned and placed while those who will come to rest beneath them are still very much alive. To be able to see your own headstone is one thing; to see the site of your burial, even; but to be able to visit your own grave, complete with headstone and covered by deadfall as though it had been dug and the earth had settled many years before--the thought confounds me. And yet--to be able to visit when the maples blossom in April; when their leaves, larger than hands, fan out in July; when they flame against the sun low on the horizon in October; when the branches are coated in shining white rime in January; to be able to witness with living eyes the perennial beauty of this place must be a comfort.

I exit the thicket and walk a ways on level ground among the taller and grander tombs, many of which I recognize, by now, from previous visits. On the other side of the path, the slope falls away toward a muddy section of road yet to be paved, stagnant water caught in tire tracks. Fragments--scraps?--of half-carved stone are strewn down there, as well as the sawed-off remnants of thick trees either downed by storms or removed to make way for more graves. Among the untamed brush below, flashes of blue and red dart through the air--birds, charging musically at each other in pairs in what I assume--or probably simply project--is a display of courtship.

I pause to listen and take note of the multiplicity of birdsong around me. In the past few months I've heard only the caws and honks of crows and geese. But now there are warbles and squeaks, pips and stutters, hoots and trills. And then, just as I begin to continue walking back toward the center of the cemetery, I am frozen dead in my tracks: a herd--almost a stampede--of white-tailed deer hurry in a flash across the path not twelve feet in front of me. Two dozen or more charging down a slope to my right and continuing down into a valley to my left, crossing what must be fifty feet or more in a matter of seconds. I stand stock still, dumbfounded in the proverbial headlights.

Until the thrum of a woodpecker shakes me aware again and I keep walking. Out the gates and back onto the street. Back among the herd.

Entry 4

In the midst of a city all too familiar with rust, verdigris glows strange in the crepuscular light. I like to think of this bright cyan crust as rust’s counterpoint: where rust is a sign of deterioration, verdigris is a sign of growth, a coat, cover, blanket. Rust is disintegration; verdigris, a kind of blooming. The Statue of Liberty was not always green. Cast in bronze, when it was dedicated in 1886 it was a dark caramel color. Some time after the turn of the century, a patina began to spread over her skin, caused by the oxidation of the copper. By 1906 the statue was completely covered. While Congress authorized funding to repair the statue, the public protested and the Army Corps of Engineers decided that the verdigris, in fact, protected the statue. As a 1906 New York Times article relates, Lady Liberty is “enveloped in a singular mantle of varying shades of light green, delicate white, and a subtle dash of yellow. The whole gives a marvelous harmony of blended colors...as striking as it is unique.”

*

The Porter Angel in Allegheny Cemetery dates from sometime between 1910-1920. Originally a sandstone sculpture, it was replaced by a replica cast in bronze by Brenda Putnam. The androgynous angel stands on the second of the three steps that make up the granite pedestal, long robes covering its body and draping over its feet. You can tell that one of its legs is gently bent, and its torso is twisted slightly to the side. It appears in mid-motion, though it is unclear whether the angel is ascending or descending the stairs. Its head is turned to the side, gazing downward. Its right hand is outstretched, thumb and forefinger almost meeting as though to pluck something out of the air, and its left hand reaches forward toward me. Its wings are outspread gloriously behind it.

We recognize more human than bird in the angel, as though the wings are an afterthought, an idiosyncrasy that just happens to differentiate the celestial messengers from ourselves. Yet there is something of the beast in the angel, something inhuman and wild. The crows, as usual, wheel above me, calling out to each other in their inscrutable, cacophonous tongue. Angel, neither human nor animal, of this world or the next. Messengers of the in-between. We envy their freedom, but relish our own free will. The verdigris softens the angel’s edges, radiant. Unearthly is the word that comes to mind.

*

Rust. I think of the neighborhood of Lawrenceville that surrounds the cemetery. Narrow row houses line the streets and warehouses gape onto a wide network of back alleys, a cityscape largely unchanged since the industrial era. In the heyday of the steel industry, this neighborhood was filled with blue collar workers and manual laborers, the bodies that fed furnaces and sloughed off slag from pig iron. And in the middle of it all, three hundred pristine green acres, crowded with the mausoleums and memorials of the wealthy—including Henry Kirke Porter, businessman and Congressional representative.

Walking the scenic route back to Center Avenue through side streets and alleyways, I come across a shrine to the Virgin Mary someone has set up in their small front yard, behind a rickety gate whose black paint is peeling away to expose the red-brown rot beneath. Electric blue Christmas lights are strung around the altar, flicker on as the twilight deepens. They illumine Mary’s face and outstretched hands, bathing her in blue-green.

In the garden behind her, the daffodils have begun to lift their heads from the soil.

*

Entry 3

Today, I notice the children.

I don’t particularly want to be here. It’s the busiest week I’ve had this semester, and I barely manage to squeeze in this trip on a Sunday afternoon. I timed my visit with the warmest part of the day; though it’s been an unseasonably temperate February, today is just above freezing, and the overcast skies are only just beginning to admit patches of sunlit blue. It’s not easy to spend much more than an hour here today, and I try to limit myself to one loop around the main road.

Of course, this plan fails spectacularly. It’s difficult not to wander, to stray off the path. A toppled piece of statuary catches my eye, or a particularly ornate grave, or the candle-flame of an imported cypress stretching skyward high on a hill, and I have to get closer for a better look.

Oddly, even given my meandering and magnetic wanderings around the cemetery, I’m preoccupied in my own thoughts -- work that needs to be done, errands that need to be run. I’m frustrated with the cold, longing impatiently for the warm breath of spring to arrive.

Until the little graves begin to draw my attention. I’m not sure why they stand out to me. Perhaps because there are so many of them that they have simply flattened out into the landscape. Headstones the size of throw pillows, ledgers only three feet long.

GEORGE JOHN WILKINSON

1887-1891

OUR BOY

Infant mortality rates were, of course, far higher in the nineteenth century. Losing one, if not several, children was far from uncommon. Still, the frequency with which these small graves appear astonishes me. One couple have three children buried beside them, all lost in infancy. I cannot help but imagine their frail bones light as birds’ beneath my feet. I think of spring, of its promise of new life, of hatching and blooming.

A wheel of crows spins loudly overhead. I walk through a clutch of barren trees and more disperse from its branches. I realize that I am the one to have disturbed them. Their caws sound as if they are borne more of annoyance than anything else.

WALLIE

ONLY SON OF

JAMES & LETITIA HOLMES

DIED NOV. 4 1864

AGED 4 YRS 7 MOS & 4 DAYS

I think of spring again, of the lush of summer to which it serves as prologue. How these branches like phalanges will be hidden by a cover of leaves, how we will forget the stark grace of what lies beneath, of what will always remain through the verdant seasons that give way to the flame of autumn, what stays on after everything else has withered. I think of the crows, their proud dark forms, beaks of black walnut, clustered by the tens of thousands among these skinned branches that dare, defiantly, to remain.

We notice the crows in the winter, when the leaves are gone. When they are revealed by absence. When they bloom among the fallow.

LOUISA

DAUGHTER OF

WILLIAM AND ELIZA B. THAW

BORN MAY 10 1842:

DIED AUG 18 1843

As I stand beneath the bare boughs, looking up into the webbings of shadow crosshatching a gradually lightening canvas of sky, I realize that I’m desperately searching for the telltale roundings at their tips that signal their readiness to bud and blossom in the coming months. For a sign of reprieve from winter’s hold. A sign of life.

Entry 2

The ground is dusted with a confectioner's-sugar patina of snow that’s begun to go stale and hard. A clear afternoon, cold and windless. Snowclouds still threaten a flurry overhead, punctuated by rhombi of blue like casement windows opening out onto the sky. Today I enter the cemetery from the Butler St. entrance, on the northwestern edge of the grounds, technically the cemetery’s official entryway. A grandiose Tudor-style sandstone gate complex straddles what was once the entrance to Colonel George Bayard’s farm, before all one hundred acres were purchased in 1844 to establish a cemetery large enough to accommodate the dearly departed members of the congregation of the Third Presbyterian Church. At present, it covers three hundred acres.

I’ve printed out a guide to a walking tour of Allegheny Cemetery available on their website, figuring I ought to get more formally acquainted with the land and its most notable residents. And I can’t resist a good historical walking tour. Did you know that twenty-two mayors of Pittsburgh, including its first mayor, Ebenezer Denny, are buried here?

As it turns out, I’m pretty bad at following directions, and soon end up ditching the guide after getting more than slightly lost. I keep veering off the paved roads to wend through the sprawling family plots, climbing steep hillsides made slippery by the crust of snow. Stones and trees stand out stark and sharp in the chill air. Winter has a way of crisping the edges of things, running an icy thumbnail along the fold of January’s paper. The limbs and bare branches of trees are silhouetted in black against the pale backdrop of sky, innumerable and intricate webs like the crazing in the glaze of a ceramic bowl. I collect a few leaves as I go, hoping to get a better sense of the flora that inhabit the grounds: scarlet oak, planetree maple, Norway spruce, holly.

I spot only two deer today, a pair of doe, stock-still and staring at me intensely when I turn a corner. I stop, nod awkwardly in acknowledgement, and continue around the bend of a hill. When I turn around, they’ve vanished. Only a single crow, invisible somewhere in its arboreal perch, lets out a caw, and then another, and is silent.

A surprising number of cars are driving through today, and it’s not until I spot four or five men in coveralls beside a bright orange backhoe that I realize a funeral ended not very long ago. I watch surreptitiously, about a hundred yards away as the workers dismantle the casket-lowering contraption and load it back into a large van. From my position, I cannot see the open grave. One man climbs into the cabin of the backhoe, pushes in and packs down the dirt in a matter of minutes. Perhaps this cacophony of man and machine have made the deer scarce, or perhaps the rime of snow and ice has made it difficult to scour the ground for edibles. But who can explain today’s absence of crows? It may be the case that, because it is still early, they have yet to return from their afternoon errands to roost en masse for the evening.

Farther along on my walk I notice a gravestone shared by one George Porter Hogg, Jr., and Betsy Hewitt Hogg, atop of which a blue Ziplock bag is held down by several large rocks. I brush snow off the plastic, peer in and see several sheets of paper, letters, it looks like, the top one which begins in typewritten red ink, “DAD:”. George and Betsy died in 2015 and 2016 at the ages of 95 and 96, respectively. In the center of the Hogg family plot stands a bronze angel on a tall stone pedestal, a monument (the guide tells me, making itself useful once again) cast around 1850. With one hand reaching toward the earth and one pointing to the sky, the angel seems ready to take George and Betsy's hands and ascend with them heavenward, only a temporary visitor to this mortal plane. Yet it seems as though it’s been caught here for some time, waiting, perhaps impatiently, for the dead to awaken. Its robes are tarnished to teal, and an almost fluorescent algae-green stain looks as though it’s been dripping down one side of the pedestal for a century and a half. The angel is melting, going nowhere fast.

In 1845, Margaretta Bayard Briggs, daughter of Col. Briggs whose farm this land once was, became the first burial in Allegheny Cemetery. While the guide is not too specific on its location, I believe I identify her final resting place, though I have my doubts since the text on the granite upright is almost entirely effaced. I’m fairly certain, however, that I can make out

BA               B        GS

just barely in relief on the weather-worn marker. The bed-like ledger stone to which the upright is affixed like a headboard looks to be mouldering, blemished by splotches of velvety white lichen. I try to imagine how George Briggs felt as he laid his young daughter to rest here, just one year after he sold his land, his home, only for it to become the very graveyard in which he buried his child. A plot of earth once meant to nurture new life, given over, now, to the dead.