A cemetery

On a low hill above Tea Creek outside Milroy, PA is a cemetery. The oldest section is closest to the road, which accounts for my noticing it.

I must have driven past hundreds of cemeteries over the years but this one caught me, made me find a wide place to turn about and come back. I parked at the end of the farm drive next to the cemetery, waving to the Mennonite woman who paused briefly in her chores to glance at me quizzically.

The rows of headstones were lined up perfectly like folding chairs at the school play. Perhaps it was this detail that I found most compelling. Or perhaps it was the age of the headstones, some with the carvings no longer much resembling letters and words but still clearly inscriptions.

This is a respected place, a place cherished by someone who has kept the grass nicely trimmed around each stone and the stones themselves all upright and aligned. In perfect rows all facing down slope toward the living people below. The dead are perfectly positioned to watch the processions of the living on the road below, going about their lives.

The first real play in which I ever appeared was my eighth grade production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. I was to have played the part of George except I was too tall for Nancy who was playing Emily, at least according to Nancy’s mom who was a big wheel in the parish and made a federal case of the height difference to Sister Verona… (intake of breath) but, let’s not go there (sniff!).

Since I first read that script, I’ve been affected – one might say, haunted – by the cemetery scene. The idea of the dead sitting in their chairs watching and commenting on the world of the living, the people who don’t really understand. The ones who can’t really understand life so long as they remain caught up in it.

Today, just outside Milroy, PA I finally saw that scene as Wilder must have seen it. It was magical.

I’ll sleep well tonight

You get a good rest, too.