The Dead Still Sleep

The gravel road opened up in front of us.  Locals call it “The Low Road”, almost like one word – thelowroad.  Locals use it much like today’s popular country songs about riding with your girl or your dip, that’s how we use the The Low Road.  It skirts low land adjacent to the Mississippi River and winds it’s way up through a beautiful national park.  I’m sure there’s a legal name for it, but where pavement meets gravel in the old North part of town, it’s the low road.

I had propped the little one up on the arm rest console between the seats and told myself to worry about the gravel and dirt some other time.  His brother in the passenger seat had plugged in his iPhone and was playing a tune with the lyrics “raising hell and praising God” and declared it “the” song for the day.  But his five percent charge would mean the song’s anthem was short lived.  But the morning was still early, and the adventure was just beginning.

I’ve been on the road hundreds of times, both driver and passenger.  This was the first time I have ever seen the green state sign announcing a cemetery.  It’s a small sign and I passed it, backed up, and looked up the hill for a sign of a cemetery.  There at the top of a hill, which would not have been visible in Spring or Summer, was a monolithic marker rising high.

My boys and I pulled over to the edge of the road and climbed the 60 or so feet to the top of the cemetery.  This part of my hometown is filled with hills, and I had to wonder who stopped so many years back and began plots on all these knolls rising high out of the ground. 

Remnants of a fairly modern handrail built from wood help climbers to the top, where the wilderness is trying hard to reclaim a late 1800’s, early 1900’s cemetery.  Several stones still stand, others have fallen and slipped down the hill.  Wire fencing still marks a family plot.  My nephews asked if we could come back in the winter and do rubbings of the stones.  Our feet crunched over leaves as their eyes spotted more stones. We picked up fallen buckeye seeds as a souvenir of the day. 

And left the dead where they lay to make our way back to the car.