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.