Thursday, January 03, 2008

An Uh-Oh Realized & Other Grave Issues

My pond, 7 a-m
Totally frozen over
The ducks, they are gone


My pond, 3 p-m
Totally frozen over
The ducks still are gone

~~~

I'm a Grave-Digger
OK, so I don't actually "dig" graves in graveyards,
BUT I really ~dig~ taking pictures of graves in graveyards!



If no one snaps the
Crumbling stones of the long-gone
Words soon are long-gone


Stones sink in the ground
Dates forever lost to view
Our loss, not the dead's



In Memory Of
Elizabeth Reed? That's an
Allman Brother's song!

~~~
(ok, so my haiku skills need some work)
~~~

I've been "digging" into the history of my family for quite a few years now. While googling one of my GGG grandparents names, I discovered Find A Grave's (FAG) website. That was the beginning of a minor obsession, tho there are those who would beg to differ and say it was a major and majorly weird obsession of mine. What person in their right mind would spend their time in graveyards photographing stones of dead people???? OK, I must admit it might sound rather strange, but I must tell you there's a true peaceful "thing" that happens to me when I'm alone doing this. I love it. Anywho, back to why I first started doing this. We have many graveyards in our area that are or, until recently, were photographically undocumented. As you can see by the above photos, this is not a good thing because stones have a finite life. It is FAG's (and all of we volunteer FAG photographers) goal to photo every gravestone possible before they disintegrate and are lost forever. I've really enjoyed my time "walking with the past", and because of the generosity of fellow FAG photographers, have "found" the stones of quite a few of my ancestors. Someday soon I'll tell you about the time I literally half-fell into a grave in the cemetery....it was quite memorable, to say the least!


Hmmmmm.....what will we explore tomorrow?? You'll just have to wait and see!

~~~
xoabb

2 comments:

  1. hi Ann, the blogette,

    congats on ur blog and happy new year from the Floridians!!
    at my age i tend to stay away from the cemetaries, u know, gonna be there soon enough.
    BTW not a good idea to feed bread or any foods made from flour to the pond folks as it causes algae to form in the pond. when they poop it starts the process.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the bread head-up. Algae has been a problem in the past for us. Now the hard part: Convincing my husband to stop feeding them! Maybe I can get some other kind of duck food.
    abb

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for taking the time to leave a thought. It's appreciated! xoabb