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- My mother's basement
Consider the intimate feeling for and knowledge of a place where one's "dead are in the churchyard - thirty generations laid". And then to have to up and leave for pastures unknown.
My biological father died when I was 4 months old. He’s planted behind a Catholic church in rural Wisconsin, as are his and my ancestors going back to the first of them to land in America, in the mid- to late-19th century.
I know a few of these relatives of my generation and one generation ahead of me, but I never really lived among them beyond those first few months. So, my kin if not quite my kith.
I visit that graveyard every time I get back that way. I’ve cleaned out the lichens growing in the engravings on the headstone, questioning if it was the right thing to do as I was doing it. Nothing lasts forever, not even names and dates etched in stone.