green hill

when i am walking around a cemetery, i contemplate (among other things) where i might be buried one day.  my family cemetaries are in ohio and pennsylvania, but these states are an unlikely final destination for my bones.  i do think it's nice, for those left behind, to have a stone with your name & dates of when you were on this earth.  something that confirms you were a living, loving human at one point in history.  but there's just no obvious location for my stone & bones.  so where?

this looks like a nice spot ~

the statuary below is, actually, a draped urn.  but from this side & with the big sky, it reminded me of pictures i've seen of the heads at Easter Island.  go figure.  my brain makes some weird connections at times.

this 'S' was at the entrance to a family plot.  it makes me sad to see family plots where, it seems, only the two originally deceased family members reside...the rest of the plots unclaimed, descendents buried elsewhere.  so not what the great-grandparents envisioned.

this particular plot (that of the S family)

had an entire row of identical headstones with a scroll motif.

                
               how i realized this headstone was carved as a tree stump:

                     1.  hm, that says "woodmen of the world." peculiar.

                     2.  huh, those are axes just below.

                     3.  hey, wait a minute, it's a tree stump!  very cool.

(if, like i did, you want to find out more about Woodmen of the World, click here.)

while i'm not a big fan of plastic cemetery flowers (although i understand the practicality of them), i am touched by the trees that people choose for planting near their graves.  one headstone looked like it even had to be moved to accommodate a large magnolia growing nearby.

it's still winter, but there were a few early flowers ~

flowering plum

witch hazel

there are a lot of babies and young children buried at this city cemetery, which dates from the late 1800's.  mostly, they have names - although one headstone simply said 'Our Baby.'  in some family plots, there were multiple stones of children who had lived days or, even, a handful of years.

then there are the angels ~

somehow i don't think these mardi gras beads are an original element.

every last one of these cherubs was missing something.

a foot, an arm, a wing, some toes.

i was especially taken with the moss

and the texture it added to each sweet face.

blue sky