Gnarled Tree with Tombstones

It's been spring break week at the University where I work, and with so many students and faculty - and even some of the staff - gone, the place has seemed deserted and quiet. With a somewhat slower pace at work, I took the opportunity to schedule a vacation day for Friday.

The afternoon turned sunny and beautiful, with blue skies and puffy white clouds. We stopped by one of my favorite places, a local cemetery that I pass twice each day that I drive to work, but hardly ever have time to stop at.

I have posted photos from this place several times before: a red-tailed hawk, a morning tree and sky, a sunny late-October afternoon.

But the photo I took here that has stuck with me the longest is the one I posted last February, along with the story of the passing of my friend Nancy, of a bird nest with funeral flowers. (Can she possibly have been gone more than a year already? Where has the time gone?) What touched me most about it was the way that life and death had been inextricably intertwined, woven together to create an unusually fancy and functional item that would nurture and sustain new life.

This tree that I love grows near the oldest part of the cemetery. It is gnarled, and its roots have grown around the tombstones next to it, like it is guarding or maybe even sheltering them. I like to stand and look at it and think about what it all means.

Deep thoughts: someday my own bones will be laid to rest in a cemetery not unlike this one, at home next to my family; in the same cemetery where my uncle's bones were laid last October on a sunny afternoon. That day was much like this one, except the temperatures were a bit warmer and the foliage was still in flames. I wrote about that here.

The song to accompany this photo is the Dave Matthews tune, Gravedigger. My favorite version of it is one he performed with Emmylou Harris, one of the grand dames of country music, on a show called CMT Crossroads in January 2004. But I couldn't find that one on YouTube. So here he is, singing it by himself.