I've talked about it before, but the Elmwood cemetery, halfway between my house and downtown, is in terrible shape. The city replaced the chain-link fence I used to run my hand along as a child during a gentrification project a few years ago, but from the first row things are going awry. Sinkholes, fallen stones, illegibility, weeds, odd lumps in the terrain...it's bizarre. Well, not really; it's an old cemetery, I suppose, and there've been maybe a dozen people interred there in the last fifty years. It's been niggling at me for most of my life in a very low-key way.
So I walk around there today on my walk from downtown, and decide to go back home and get my camera to come back and take a few pictures, wondering if there are such things as a cemetery manifest and if anyone else cares about this. Is reconstruction even possible? I see two women walking around with a binder, and it turns out less than twenty-four hours ago a story was printed about these two women and their decision to, well, clean up the cemetery.
I introduced myself and we chatted for a while about the sorry state of the cemetery, the city's $300,000 fence, and how the city doesn't want anyone to see the list of occupancy, as it were, because the paper is too fragile. So next spring and summer I may be trying to assist in the restoration of the Elmwood cemetery.
I'm glad it was a nice day.
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5 comments:
I suppose what I meant by "knowing how to live in the real world" would have been better put as "not causing a stir over other actions that are essentially harmless to my well-being." I know there are statistics that suggest smoking is more dangerous than nuclear war and all, but I don't care. I guess I don't like the smoker's alley at my theater being robbed unilaterally of its place. I was glad to see today that this authoritarianism was being defied by some fellow students today.
- Jesse
today today today. I just got done with two midterms, so I guess I haven't yet come down. Yikes. Also, this could be one of those things where I take a more curmudgeonly position than a reasoned one.
- Jesse
Sure, understandable--that's your smoking alley on more than one level.
But why respond here in my threads?
Must you take issue with my paralogical thinking? Hrm? I dunno. Maybe I was just trying to blow smoke in an unwanted place. Heh.
- Jesse
Nice! That place is in need of some repair.
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