I live in limbo.
Suspended somewhere between towering
Steel Titans and
an ocean of corn.
It's that time of the year again.
I know where I need to go.
I sit in traffic, start and stop.
This line stretches to the main road.
I'll be here awhile.
I close my eyes and I'm there already
My quarter mile square of peace
that shouldn't be peaceful.
A car horn blares behind me,
urging me to scoot up fifty feet
just to stop again for another five minutes.
I just want to get there and away
from this fight,
away from these angry people.
I know they're just anxious
to get home after their
daily nine to five
in the city.
They keep inching West, like me.
But I'm not going home.
Finally at the light.
I turn up the radio.
It's clear the stiff in the three piece suit
in the next lane
is not
a fan of Van Halen.
I return his surly glare
with one of my own.
Past the light and
I keep rolling on.
Past the restaurants and
tanning salons.
I stop at the grocery store
and pick up some orchids for her.
I pick the purple ones
because I think maybe,
she might have liked purple.
But I have no idea, not really.
Breaching suburbia,
where I pass housing developments
that someone had the audacity to brand
with snooty names reminiscent
of high end golf clubs.
Who do they think they are?
As I go, the houses get bigger,
further apart.
The windows down,
I take a cleansing breath.
The air, a little cleaner
than before.
Coasting into rural territory,
I glance at the equestrian farm
and abandoned barns,
ripe with decay,
that might crumble
at the slightest touch.
On and on,
just trying to get
to that place,
where few go but me.
That peaceful place
that really shouldn't be peaceful.
I pull up to that familiar octagonal STOP.
Look right to the llama farm,
Left to the empty bean field,
Straight ahead at the sign: Plain City - Georgesville Rd.
I think maybe they call it Plain because
It all looks quite the same.
Over hills that send my stomach into my lungs,
Past the Canaan Community mobile homes
Which is apparently "A nice place to live."
I know its up here on the left,
That old gravel drive that
no one else sees when they pass.
One more hill and I'm here.
Pulling in under the archway that reads
FOSTER CHAPEL CEMETERY.
I turn down the music,
slow the car,
turn off the engine and listen.
Birds, slight breeze,
the occasional passing car
that sounds like a jet plane out here.
Sinking sun sets this place ablaze.
Wish granting dandelions and silk flower petals
strewn by the whispering wind.
Cars pass by, they don't look this way.
I imagine if they did,
they would marvel that a red Grand Am,
and a living person were there where
hardly anyone ever goes.
This is a place for the dead.
I sit on a cracked stone bench
and watch a monarch
flutter and rest on someone's resting place.
I come here when I can't breathe at home.
And sometimes I'm awed by how
beautiful it is here.
How peaceful it is in this moment.
Then I remember why I came today.
A hundred yards of hundred year old
headstones that have since been
weathered illegible.
A few, I can still make out.
Six feet under,
the bones of people I never knew.
Sometimes I wonder about their stories,
the things they might've done
when they lived.
Bow my head for the ones who died young.
On my way to the back,
I look over one I've read a dozen times.
"Jonathan Alder
First white settler in Madison Co.
Taken by the Indians in 1781,
Returned to his mother in 1805."
So much history here.
People who were buried here
after death.
And of course there's her.
The girl who died here
at the hands of a very bad person.
Incongruously dead among
the dead who belonged here,
she was gone before my birth.
I never knew her,
never knew she was here before
I found this place by accident one summer.
Took the second time I came to notice
the wooden cross wired to the fence in the back.
"KILLED HERE MARCH 17, 1991"
It makes me sick to see it.
But still, I lay down the bit of life
I plucked from a bucket in the store.
I always come a month after
the anniversary of her death.
I imagine it might be sufficiently awkward to run into
her family, who may wonder
why a girl who never knew her
would lay flowers in her memory.
There was some rumor years ago
that she haunted this place.
I don't know about that.
But if her spirit still roamed here,
tormented soul, I'd like to think
that she is glad for the company when I come.
For I come more often not in April,
but when I'm angry
or can't clear my head.
I find peace in the beauty here,
and wonder in the extensive history,
and a reminder.
She reminds me that
she never had the chance at life that I do.
She reminds me to appreciate
the life I was given.
Reminds me it could be taken
from me any day.
Some think it strange to find peace
in a place of death and tragedy.
And I must agree.
But this is also a place of rest.
A quiet place for the dead to sleep,
or maybe wait for company.
I don't always do right.
Don't always say the right thing.
I can be volatile and childish sometimes.
And I come here when I know I need to be humbled.
And I wonder to myself,
Isn't this a strange place for peace?