Time Immemorial 8/2/2020

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

Not far from my home there is a historic site. If it weren’t for the marker you’d never know it though.  I had barely heard of its existence and I am a bit of an eccentric when it comes to local history.  If it had no marker there wouldn’t be really much of anything at all to see. There are beautiful rolling green fields patch worked with trees and possibly some fencing.  Nothing particularly remarkable stands out other than enchanting rural scenery.  You would never know that this site was a civil war conscription camp.  You would certainly not suspect that there was also a hospital as well as a cemetery here.  All traces of the past here seem to be vanished. The railroad that brought young men here over a century and a half ago still runs nearby as it has for decades.  These rails no longer carry men bound for battle. The cargo is non-human freight now minus the engineer and I can’t help but wonder if he knows the fear and restlessness that once filled the cars on these tracks.

I find it strange and somewhat sad that this historical site has been utterly and completely lost to time.  Mostly I suppose I am perplexed by the fact that in this verdant stretch of rolling green, somewhere there was, or is, a cemetery because it is rare to see a cemetery that has simply vanished.  Yes, they get old and forgotten. Often the stone angels are choked by underbrush. Monuments tend to topple with the marching on of time. Ghosts don’t make very good groundskeepers you see. They tend to like things a bit more untended, it makes them feel more at home. While cemeteries do often fall by the wayside, especially as the years from their last use increase, it is not very often that they completely disappear.  It saddens me to think of some final resting place for a brother, a father, a son, being lost, not to time and nature but to disregard. For loved ones to move away or to be lost to the years is one thing but for the last memorials to be lost to what I can only guess would be the plow is quite another.  The memories aren’t even there to be forgotten anymore, they have ceased to be.

I have spoken several times in this blog about my love for old places and things. Those hallowed plots of ground often surrounded by wrought iron fences as well as homes that have been left only with spiritual inhabitants often find their way into my thoughts and writings.  I’ve always loved ghost stories but I don’t like being scared.  I think my infatuation with such tales are because they involve a places like the aforementioned ones, places with history. I mean really, can a place even be “haunted” if it doesn’t have an interesting past of which to tell? If something never happened in a locale then supernatural lore about it is not likely to just appear. It’s the stories within the geography that give it an intrigue.  This is why I love old cemeteries and old homes.  Each weathered bit of marble holds more about life than death. Every square foot of clapboard is alive with generations of memory.

I think this is the true explanation as to why I am so enamored with all things with a past. I guess in some way, when I stumble upon one of those historical markers on the side of the road, which I admit it takes everything in me to not stop at every one I see, I feel like perhaps if I do read and investigate and try to imagine, that somehow I am preserving the lives of those that were there.  Somehow if I read the words on that plaque on a pole and allow my imagination to seep into the past it almost feels, and this is probably the hopeless historical romantic in me, that those people are still alive with value. Though their families and friends have long since returned to the dust from whence they came, it feels like the love of parents and children, siblings and spouses seems to return. The affection and sincerity of those most basic emotions seems to light the scene in a different way.  Bird song is now mingled with old voices.  Laughter and possibly even song weaves its way through trees and breathes across the grasses of empty meadows.  The light falls differently and you can almost see faces in the shadows.  In my mind’s eye they are thankful to be remembered. You see, nobody wants to become nothing more than forgotten stone carvings. Houses, when left to their own devices without a family to call their own become nothing more than wood and brick gathered in an arrangement that nature will soon dominate. It ceases to be the treasure that is a home. All the emotion and bonds that were within its walls wither like an unwatered bouquet.  But ruins still have so many sagas to relate despite being ruined.

I suppose that is why the site that is no more saddens me. No big to-do needs to be made really. No museum needs to be built or a statue erected.  But even the stones to mark the last rest of these individuals are gone. We don’t even know where they lie. Their meager markers weren’t even left for vines to give their final embraces. Dust returned to dust with no more remembrance than that.  I don’t know the backstory as to why. But as a mother, I cannot help but think that some mamas’ babies are in these fields.  Maybe before the site was lost she came to visit it and shed tears. Maybe it was far from where she was and she never got the chance see where her darling came to rest. When I look across these pastures I can feel them.  Though I have no stone to touch gently and no mound of earth to sit beside, I think of them and the tales their lives could tell. I know you remembered them in your day, mothers and fathers of years gone by. I know they were loved and they meant the world to you despite their forgotten state now. But standing in that stretch of seemingly insignificant green, I will look and listen as closely as I can, for a mother’s last lullaby on the breeze.