Our property adjoins the old West Bradford cemetery. The two- or three-acre plot of ground is the most visible remnant of the dairy, sheep and apple community of West Bradford, which was hacked out of the steep slopes above the Connecticut river in the first part of the nineteenth century, peaked before the Civil War, and then went into decline more than a century and a half ago. West Bradford lost its post office address in the 1920s and its schoolhouse (if word-of-mouth can be trusted) before W W II. We still have a few sheep and horses and some beef cattle but also an ever-increasing number of commuters who head down I-91 for their employment in Lebanon or Hanover.
The history of West Bradford can be read in the cemetery's gravestones. There must two hundred of them. The oldest are made of local slate and are only a foot or eighteen inches in height; these date from the 1820s. One or two of them feature lugubrious, stunted iconic weeping willows which rain and wind have rendered barely visible. The markers that date from the end of the nineteenth century are larger, made of marble that was quarried thirty miles to the west of us, and reflect the area's growing prosperity. They're laconic -- just name and dates -- and entirely bereft of adornment or decoration. They celebrate the Baldwins and Cunninghams and Lows and Tebbetses who cleared these hilly fields with horses and oxen and who left behind all those massive and beautiful stone walls that snake and twist their way through lands that are once again deeply forested. There are women buried here who have been denied even the brief immortality that a grave marker affords: a man's name and dates and the notation "his wife" or sometimes even "his wives."
Quarter-size headstones, numerous and unincised, attest to unbaptized infants.
There's a new part of the cemetery, still in use, which to my eyes is less sturdy and more frivolous -- an emblem of a culture in decline. Just because it's possible to laser a prancing reindeer onto a granite headstone doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do so. How all those long-bearded and puritanical Emersons and Pipers would have railed against such trifling?
A few years ago, one of our local Thurstons erected a pink granite stone with a plastic cross epoxyed to its surface. The cross, it was said, was to be a perpetual lantern -- lit until the end of time by some sort of device that gathered energy during the day and discharged it at night. "Oh no," I thought the first few times that I came home late at night and was greeted by a ruby and unwinking polysterene crucifix, "how ugly, how tacky, how out-of-keeping." Fortunately, the perpetual light only lasted a year or so before extinguishing itself for good.
I rather enjoy having a cemetery is nearby. "Quiet neighbors," as they say here. Our house lies halfway between the cemetery and the pond. It's satisfying to be flanked by crucial symbols of life and death. My only quarrel is that occasionally a visitor to the cemetery, perhaps a decayed descendant of one of the pioneers, will pitch an old vase or some sun-faded plastic flowers onto our land. I don't so much mind picking up a few pieces of trash as I object to my property being used as someone's rubbish heap. It's disrespectful. But any person who would think to commemorate his mother with polycarbonate or acrylic geraniums will generally not be the most mannerly or ecologically sensitive of souls.
One day, many years ago, I was sitting on the cemetery's split-rail fence with D., a local farmer. We were chatting about the weather and such. He suddenly swung around and pointed to one of the headstones: "That's the boy that died of eating the crayons."
To honor both the visitors and the inhabitants of the West Bradford cemetery, I've composed a country-and-western quatrain.
Remember me in marble and in granite;
Remember me with rose and lilies brave;
Remember me in sunshine and in shadow
But don't put plastic flowers on my grave.
You might want to take a look at my blog post "One Word: Plastics" about the way my sister-in-law has turned a family plot into a landfill in our historic 19th century cemetery - adjacent to grazing cows on Michigan farmland http://drlightness.blogspot.com/2009/10/one-word-plastics.html
I found yours with a google search and applaud you!!! Applause! Applause!!!
Posted by: Unbearable Lightness | October 14, 2009 at 03:45 PM