THE 16TH DAY OF LEAP MONTH

NEGLECTED

Yep, we get an extra day this year/month.  Leap year!  For those of you with only a public, government school, education that means there are 29 days in Feb.  Only happens every four years.  And those that are born on that day get to celebrate their birthdays only once every four years.  So when you're a hundred, in fact you're only 25.  Boy wish the body could weather that easily.  But it did get me thinking a bit of what is and what was.

This family cemetery is on a little road on the central Eastern Shore of Maryland.  Somewhere between the communities of Kingstown and Crumpton.  It was a foggy morning and I was on my way to the Crumpton auction, which will be the subject of another blog. 

The forgotten resting place of a number of forgotten souls lies on a little knoll  in the middle of what alternatively is a corn or soybean field.  Well off the road and surrounded by a rusted and falling old fence.  The stones are so weathered as to not even show an inscription. 

Obviously, the descendants of these folks are long gone as well given the overgrown nature of the place.  The fog adds a foreboding sense of just what the place is.  How long ago were flowers brought to adorn a headstone.  Or the weeds and brush cleared away.  Could that headstone been the head of a family or the black sheep renegade of the family.  Or maybe a child taken way too early.  They were obviously loved when they passed as the location was elevated away from flooding rains and enclosed with what could only have been expensive fencing back in the day.  All kinds of questions come up when one puts his or her back to the old oak tree in the center giving thought to what is and isn't.  The tree outliving generations of questions.

These were not folks who were famous people in the early history of the country.  Such as Tench Tilghman, an Eastern Shore icon of the early wars of this country and one of Washington's revolutionary buddies.  He is buried in a well maintained  cemetery near Oxford, MD.  Hell, he even had an island named after him.  Not so these folks.  Just farm folk most likely laid to rest in a field on their farm by their family and mourned by only a few within a twenty mile radius.

Frankly, I prefer the headstone used to advertise a funeral home in Chestertown, MD a few years ago.  Seems more today as it were.