in the lonely graveyard...

...many miles away,
lies your own dear mother,
slumberin' in the clay.
If you love your mother,
meet her in the sky,
she'll be waitin' for you,
in your home on high.

When anyone in my mother's family would start to bicker, her grandmother always (rather annoyingly, I think) started to sing this song.  For "mother" she'd substitute whomever the target person was fighting with/being disrespectful to/treating unkindly etc.  She never sang it to me, but every time I go anywhere near a cemetery, that song starts reeling through my head. 

This weekend my parents came through my town on the way to a family reunion in Danburg, Ga.  Never heard of Danburg?  That's because there are two churches, five or six houses, a historical marker, and cemeteries in Danburg.  And that's all.  Danburg was a happy little Southern town that was built on cotton farming, and when the boll weevil migrated into the South, it brought Danburg to its knees. 

So that now, when we go to Danburg, there's not much, besides tall pine trees, cicadas, rolling, empty green hills, and this:

This is a little cemetery near the one crossroads in Danburg, buried in the trees up behind a big old beautiful house.  We tramped up there Saturday afternoon after checking to see whether anybody was at home to give us permission to trespass on their land.  There wasn't, so we did anyway.  (I figure honesty is always the best policy.) 

We came through a gap in the trees, and there, in a little clearing, was a solemn, lonely, overgrown cemetery that looked almost forgotten.  Many of the headstones had tumbled down, and we had to read the markers where they lay on the ground.  I contrasted this with the tidy, well-kept public cemeteries we see in the middles of towns and I wondered what all this means.  Do people, really, care where they're buried? Does it matter whether someone comes and tends the grass, pulls the weeds, or is it just as well to be buried up here, in the silent, peaceful woods? 

If it were a cemetery I'd stumbled upon and had no connection with, I'd have passed on without wondering, but the names on these stones are the names of my family.  The people buried here, and the people that stood around in the woods solemnly the day each of them was buried, belong, in a way, to me.  There are husbands and wives buried near each other here.  There are graves with tiny markers that tell of heartbreakingly short lives.  One set of parents lay next to five infant children, born and buried over the span of a lifetime of sorrow.  Only one of their children lived to adulthood.  He is my ancestor. 

There's one stone with a husband's name carved next to his wife's.  He has a birth and death date.  She has only a birth date, but one impossibly far in the past.  Where did she go if she's not there next to him?  There are stories here that can't be told, that died with the people who are buried in the quiet woods near the crossroads in Danburg. 

How long, I wondered, looking at the trumpet vines that had shot fingers across the shady clearing, before no one can come here and read these stones at all?  How long before these people are really and truly forgotten?  And, in the end, how much does it matter?

Soon we turned and left them there, in their clearing in the woods, to go back to our homes full of chattering life, and to wonder about those people in the lonely graveyard many miles away.  Who were they?  What life did they know?  What could they teach us that would make our own lives deeper?  They didn't say.  There was only the drone of the cicadas, the breeze in the tall pines, and the silence in what's left of Danburg, Ga.