Tag Archives: postaweek2014

Weekly Photo Challenge: Threes

Posted on February 25, 2014 | 13 comments
Where is this lovely churchyard? All the epitaphs I can make out are in English.

Where is this lovely churchyard? All the epitaphs I can make out are in English. Photo by Blair Apperson.

Twenty years ago this week, my friend Blair got word that the liver surgery he’d undergone wasn’t successful and he had six months to live.  I can remember that, because he and his husband watched the Oscars after they got the news.

Blair went through a potlatch phase, where he gave his things away.  He gave me a box of cemetery photos that he had taken on his travels.  Nothing was labeled.  It felt weird to sit down with him, knowing that he was dying, and ask him to tell me about the graveyards he’d visited.  He told me some good stories, but he couldn’t remember where everything had been taken — and he’d made no notes.

All the same, I used a bunch of his photos in Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries, the first book I edited all by myself.  Blair didn’t live to see the book finished.  After it was done, after he was gone, I put his photos into sleeves and filed them away in a binder. I couldn’t look at them without thinking of him.

Kids playing football in the graveyard.

Kids playing football in the graveyard. Photo by Blair Apperson.

This month, I wanted to write about Black History for the Cemetery of the Week — and I remembered Blair’s photos.  I pulled them out again, but they remain just as mysterious to me as they did then.

If you can help me identify any of these graveyards, I would sure appreciate it.  I think they were taken in the Bahamas, maybe at Saba, but I don’t really know.  I know it’s a long shot, but I’m really hoping someone will recognize some of these images and be able to identify them for me at last.

Family plot in the backyard.

Family plot in the backyard. Photo by Blair Apperson.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Object

Posted on February 3, 2014 | 6 comments
Rain gutter in Buena Vista Park, San Francisco

Broken headstone in Buena Vista Park, San Francisco

Mary Jo Bole was in town for the summer, doing an artist-in-residency stint at the Headlands Center for the Arts. I was trying to show her a good time, but although we’d known each other for years via mail art and a shared love of cemeteries, we really didn’t know each other well. I didn’t want to tell her where we were going. I hoped she’d enjoy the surprise.

We pulled up into my old neighborhood, the lower slopes of Ashbury Heights, and searched for a parking space. That Saturday morning was one of those perfect San Francisco days that make you forget that the fog will roll in around noon and you won’t see the sun again for a week. We could see for miles across the bay.

Gutter in Buena Vista Park

Gutter in Buena Vista Park

Buena Vista Park was relatively abandoned that morning. I remember when the raspberry bushes used to hang heavy and laden over the paths and we could eat ourselves full of berries on our way to breakfast in Lower Haight, but those days were over. The neighbors had finally tired of men having sex in the bushes. The hillside looked as if it had been clear-cut, brown grass dying in the dirt beneath the elderly Monterey pines.

I led MJ to the path above the children’s playground. The paths are paved in asphalt and short retaining walls of fitted stone hold the hillsides back above them. In the gap between wall and path runs a narrow gutter, less than a foot wide. It is lined with marble, an elegant, creepy touch lost on most visitors to the park.

Our outing was a little late in the year to be optimal. In the spring, after the rains have stopped, the Friends of Park and Rec host a work day to clear the gutters in the park. If I’d been thinking, I would have brought a broom to shift the eucalyptus leaves around. Instead, I kicked the oak leaves up with my tennis shoe, looking for an inscription.

One of the nice neighbors in a rose-pink jogging suit stopped to ask, “Did you lose something?”

“No,” I said, flustered by her niceness. I could already guess she wasn’t going to like what I was going to say. “The gutter is lined with grave markers from the old Laurel Hill Cemetery. You can still read some of them, but I can’t remember exactly where the ones with inscriptions are.”

“You’re joking,” she blurted.

Rain gutter in Buena Vista

Rain gutter lined with broken headstones in Buena Vista Park

“No.” I stopped kicking at the leaves to make eye contact with her. “It says so on the signs as you enter the park.”

“Really?” MJ crowed.

“Yeah.”

Once I uncovered one name, the others were easy to find.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Juxtaposition

Posted on January 26, 2014 | 5 comments
Broken bud

Broken bud

This week’s photo challenge is to show two things side by side that comment on each other.  I like the juxtaposition of the broken rosebud on the gravestone beside the lovely pink rosebush behind it.

Broken buds like this one are often found on the monuments to Victorian children.  It’s hard to imagine a more perfect illustration of a parent’s shock and sadness when faced with burying their child, the sense of the beauty and potential cut short.  I couldn’t imagine what that kind of loss would feel like until I had an irreplaceable bud of my own.

I took this photo on a blisteringly hot afternoon in Sacramento’s Old City Cemetery. The Heritage Rose Group of the Friends of the Cemetery carefully tend the antique roses.  The cemetery’s website has this wonderful quote on it: “Many of these antique roses were brought across to California in the holds of ships or carried in wagon trains by early pioneers… Because roses are propagated by taking a piece of the original to start a new plant, they are, in essence, the same plant.  Therefore, roses in a Mandarin’s garden in old China or Empress Josephine’s famous 18th-century French garden are now planted in Sacramento’s Historic Rose Garden” in the cemetery.

I love the idea of these immortal flowers blooming and fading and blooming again over the centuries, thriving atop the graves of people who are gone to bloom again in another garden.

***

My other posts about the Sacramento City Cemetery:

A lamb on another child’s grave

Do not bury me in the cold ground.

Interview with one of the tour guides.

Upcoming tours & garden events in the cemetery.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Window

Posted on January 14, 2014 | 2 comments
Neptune Society Columbarium, San Francisco, California

Neptune Society Columbarium, San Francisco, California

The Neptune Society’s lovely columbarium in San Francisco features a stained glass window in every room off its main floor rotunda.  Every room, that is, except one.  The Tiffany window from the 13th room was stolen before the Neptune Society took possession of the building and has never been recovered.  That room has plain white frosted glass in memory of what was lost.

The columbarium is one of my favorite places in San Francisco. I take everyone there.  I even sent John Levitt there when he was looking for San Francisco locations for Unleashed, the third Dog Days book.

I’ve toured the columbarium three times now, most recently with the Obscura Society. Every tour has been different, even though caretaker Emmit Watson led each one.  After his decades of caring for the building, he has so many stories that he can tailor what he tells each time.

New window at the Neptune Society Columbarium

New window at the Neptune Society Columbarium

I’ve written about the columbarium before as a cemetery of the week, but that didn’t really explain the depth of my affection for the place.

This last time I visited, we got to explore the new wings.  I’d never been in there before.  Most of the niches are empty still, but the space was alive with the sound of a fountain.  The cool blue light coming through the stained glass window was peaceful.  I started to think that I might have found my permanent resting place in San Francisco.

I’m not in any immediate need of it, but it feels good to have that settled.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Beginning

Posted on January 5, 2014 | 3 comments
The tree monument in Bendle Cemetery, Michigan

The tree monument in Bendle Cemetery, Michigan

This lovely monument is one of the primary reasons I fell in love with cemeteries.  It stands in the little farming community graveyard near the farm where I grew up.  When I was a child, my parents drove by Bendle Cemetery all the time.  Finally, one summer day when we had nothing else to do, my mom brought my brother and I into the cemetery to explore.

Since then, I have been completely fascinated by the Youells family monument and visit it every chance I get.  The stone tree trunk stands more than six feet tall, topped with an open book inscribed with the names Abram and Harriet Youells.  A potted Calla lily and fern are carved against the base of the tree. Stone ivy rings the trunk.  Part of the “bark” seems to have been peeled back in order to write the family name.

Usually a tree trunk with its limbs removed signifies a family that dies out without heirs, but Abram left a son behind.  Apparently, Abram — who served in the Civil War, before coming to Michigan as a blacksmith —  was quite a storyteller.  The post about him on Findagrave is really worth reading.

The monument is tricky to photograph.  It stands in the permanent shadow of a whitecedar.  I have photos of it at every time of day, but this overcast afternoon proved to be the best.  I love the way the Fuji film makes the image so very green, almost as green as my childhood memories of Michigan.

I’ve written about Bendle a lot because it’s where my love of cemeteries began.  This post is about my grandmother’s headstone.  This one has more history of the cemetery and the area itself.

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