Homewood - 1st

First, some illumination:
“...it is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.” - Charlie Darwin

Now, on to Homewood:
13:46, Sunday, 6 September

I sit at the bottom of a hollow, and stretching away from me and upwards are neat rows of stone blocks, laying flush with the ground, all inscribed with a name, sometimes a year of birth, always a year of death. The stones on my right, climbing up the hill (squinting at the sun and looking at my watch, I decide they are on the west side of the hollow), are jumbled, half out of the earth, tilting and askew but keeping uniformity with their neighbors: a row of crooked teeth. While the flat floor of the hollow has been left for graves, the upward-skirting edges have been planted with trees, long ago, and these guardians shade their charges sleeping below.

I have chosen this spot for its beauty and insulation from the city as much as I have for its meaning. Every week, when I sit against this maple tree and become a jungle gym for ants and spiders, I will not be able to escape the fact that decaying bodies lie below me. I’m not doing this to be morbid; I am, rather, trying to teach myself. Death is immutable, but I have alternately feared (in the zombie/ghost way) and dreaded (in the parents getting older/friends going to war way) it for most of my life. I haven’t been able to match up my thoughts with my feelings. Recently, however, they’ve started to align.

This is a peaceful place. For a while I thought of dead-and-buried people as peacefully sleeping, but these days I just think of them as dead. Their remains, anyway. That’s just biodegradable material slowly biodegrading. I’m not sure about the other stuff, souls and afterlives and all that. I won’t be until I die myself.

I suppose one could say that we’ve scarred the landscape with these memorials, but I don’t see a wounded earth. There are chemicals in the soil, I’m sure, from the nearby city streets and the treated wood on the coffins, but these, too, come from nature. Mostly the place makes me think about cycles. These memorials are poor – only a name and (maybe) two years, they don’t even begin to encompass what the person’s life was like. Children, jobs, dreams, lovers, secrets, hardships, nothing. Nothing, according to the cement blocks. The sleeper’s memories are gone and all that is left, in death, is a stone assuring that the sleepers did once live. And damn the ephemerality of it all, but these meager memorials, too, will one day crumble. Water will leach in, lichens will leach minerals out, the universe will favor entropy and everything will fall apart. The tombstone will crumble and turn into soil, the bodies below will decompose and add nutrients to the soil, and something will grow. Grass, violets, clover will grow. Many years from now, a house might be built. Children might be raised. They, too, will have dreams and memories and lovers and they, too, will die and fade to dust. So it goes.

I can't let those thoughts form fully, though. On a pre-autumn afternoon, it’s easier to let them swirl, hazy and indistinct, in the back of my mind. I concentrate instead on the beech and poplar trees across the way, their leaves already crisping and turning yellow. A kestrel calls from atop one of them. Ants crawl over my feet. Yellow jackets, having smelled me, come to inspect. The trees, indifferent, will not be sad if I go or upset if I stay. They will not care if I carve my initials on their trunks. They will only have to try harder to keep their leaves in the sun.