Rose Shadows and Cowpox

All aboard the S. S. Sleeper! She sails tonight. Or perhaps tomorrow, or in the next century or so. Very, very slowly.

There are so many lovely and poignant moments in a walk through Mount Auburn, it's hard to pick favorites. Here's a monument to a man lost at sea. I liked the verse. It's about the lack of closure that goes with such a tragic event:

He sleeps beneath the blue lazy sea

He lies where pearls lie deep

He was the loved of all, yet none

O'er his low bed may weep.

Everywhere, you see graven evidence of people searching for closure, for a way to be at peace with losing the ones they love. It's hardest, perhaps, for people who lose young children, but there was a terrible lot of that going around in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Influenza epidemics, typhoid, cholera, yellow fever...they took an awful toll.

I could hardly look at this little sculpture of two children sleeping, imagining the loss behind it,

for they were often lost in twos and threes as an epidemic swept through a household. The idea of such a thing happening today is very remote to us, but was very real then.

Climbing roses, planted so many decades later, cast a beautiful shadow, a shadow of remembrance and sorrow, and life blooming perhaps again, somewhere.

And here is the grave of someone who did something about it all. Benjamin Waterhouse, of Harvard College, introduced to the United States a vaccine for the devastating disease of smallpox. English physician Edward Jenner had noted that milkmaids seemed to have an immunity to smallpox, and went from there. He hypothesized that their exposure, in the course of their work, to the biologically similar cowpox virus armed their immune systems against the human variant of this horrid virus. My father loved to tell us about Jenner, as a way of telling us that we must notice things, connect things that seem unconnected, and thereby do much good. (Thanks to Tim who gracefully and quietly corrects the S.S. Sleeper's course from time to time).

Waterhouse's stone reads:

In 1800 he introduced to the New World 

the blessing of vaccination,

overcame popular prejudice and distrust

by testing it on his own children,

and thus established a title 

to the gratitude of future ages.

This memorial was erected by his wife, who doubtless appreciated more than anyone the sacrifice he'd made in testing it on their own children.

But I'm getting too ponderous; these stones haunt me. So I'll leave you with the monument Kris calls 

The Celestial Wedgie. Ow! Lemme go!

Great Trees of Mount Auburn

There are, of course, the trees to consider. Mount Auburn Cemetery has the grandest, most diverse, sometimes most bizarre trees...trees as varied as its monuments.

It was on my October walk with Kris that I first realized that weeping beeches must be grafted. A plant with the "weeping" mutation grows downward, or prostrate. How does a tree that grows downward instead of up ever attain any height? Wouldn't it just crawl along the ground? Well, apparently it would, unless the weeping branch is grafted, oh so very long ago, to an upright or standard trunk. Imagine being a normal beech sapling, minding your own bidness, growing straight up, then suddenly chopped off and topped with dreadlocks.

And here is the scar to show where it was grafted. Amazing. Mount Auburn is a place of reflection, wonder, and discovery for me. In looking at this scar, I suddenly made the connection with those rather ridiculous looking little weeping cherry trees everyone plants in front of their new condos--you know...the yardstick with the big foof of weeping pink-flowering branches atop it. They look like frothy pink umbrellas. Weeping beech: same deal. But much more impressive, especially given a couple hundred years. I enjoy discovering the hand of man where I'd never thought to look for it.

Each of these weeping beeches is like a citadel of privacy, especially in growing season when their leaves form a curtain all around. You push aside the long trailing fronds and enter a greengold world. I can only imagine what has gone on under these trees all these years. Lots of carving, apparently...and who knows what else. 

Speaking of trees, we found a swarm of feral honeybees in a big hollow oak. Nice to see, rather rare.  You can just pick out their golden dots in the round cavity. What a magnificent tree this was, and full of bees, too.

 Oh the trees, the beautiful trees. Things weren't really turning color just yet in the warm and protected city environs. It's so easy to forget the headstones and just appreciate the forest here. That's what the birds do. They drop into Mount Auburn like tired pebbles on their long spring and fall migratory flights, and they find what they need in her thickets and shrubbery, in the sunlit canopy of her massive trees.

I come here to appreciate truly mature trees. We plant them in our yards when they're barely bigger than we are, and we so easily underestimate the real estate they'll carve out when they're full grown. We may never see them full-grown, in fact. That's for our children's children.

 And just like in a forest, the trees are always replicating themselves. I don't know if the cemetery management wants another huge oak here, but these acorns aren't daunted. They're going to give it a go.

It is the contrast of burgeoning life with memento mori all around that brings me back to Mount Auburn Cemetery again and again. I could live here, mining her secrets and wonders, for years and never uncover them all.

Mt Auburn Cemetery: Laughing at Funerals 3

Styles in epitaphs are as varied as the careers and worldviews of the interred. Kris, ever irreverent in her reverence, delights in showing me the ones who got a bit carried away as they were being carried away.

Give me the most complex Celtic cross you can carve. Really pull out the stops on this one. Hang the expense.  I happen to love its complexity. But there's also something kind of painful about the font. I imagine chiseling it all out of granite and it makes me sigh.

 There are graven resumes everywhere. Now, I have held a few jobs for one or two years, but I'm not going to commit them to marble. Wow. Seems to me Mr. Everett bounced around a bit. All right, he bounced in high places. But he still bounced. President of this, professor of that, minister of this, senator of that.

I wish you could hear Kris' helpless laughter as she shows me this one. I know it's hard to read, so here's what it says:

"An eminent American Inventor

whose great mind conceived

ideas and brought into operation

works of art that will live for ages."

Which is not, in itself, that funny until you walk around the stone and see the carved depictions of his works of art.

No explanation needed, apparently; we'll all know what that is. For ages.

 And that? Oh, there's one in every...shoe factory? I don't know why this delights me and Kris so, but it does. No disrespect to Thomas Blanchard or his descendants intended, but this monument cracks us up.

 As does this one, which I call LEMME OUT TEBBETTS!! I think they're trying to prevent noselessness here, protecting it from acid rain, but it's just sooo creepy to see Mr. Tebbetts fogging up the Plexiglas with his cold breath.

Stones of Mount Auburn

By no means are all of Mount Auburn Cemetery's stones perfect. Some, with all apologies to the interred, are perfectly hideous.

I don't know what the hot cross buns of stone are meant to represent, but I'm missing it.  Poor Sister. Just a hop-skip away from the elegant ammonite. I am so designing my own headstone. 

Kris and I looked long and hard for the metamorphosis stone she'd found and saved to show me. I was a little crestfallen to find the butterfly and caterpillar clearly rendered innocent of any reference to their true appearance. Still, a nice concept, even if the larva's prolegs and adult's segmentation and wing overlap are all so, so wrong. Being a Science Chimp can seriously get in the way of appreciating such things. Mostly, it enhances, but sometimes it hinders.

I was delighted to find this stone on the ridge near Spectacle Pond, where I saw my first of a lifetime of great binocular-fuls. It was a May morning, probably 1978. I was focused on my first-ever (life, in bird parlance) summer tanager, an orangey-green immature male with patches of red molting in. I was already hyperventilating when a male ruby-throated hummingbird flew into the scene and stabbed at the young tanager. Little did I know one day I'd live where summer tanagers sing lazily as they masticate yellowjackets in late June; where I'd have to swat the hummingbirds away to get in the front door. I felt my life was complete with that one vision; didn't know it could get any better. 

That's living in the moment.

Some stones are heart-grippingly beautiful in their simplicity and hidden meaning. I took an introductory humanities course with William Alfred, and this tabula mysteriosa is perfect. It's perched unprepossessingly on the flank of "Harvard Hill," where the University's nearest and dearest rest. Kris found that, too, when she found our beloved former Dean Archie Epps' stone, and noticed that everyone around him had a connection to Harvard.

 Kris remarked as we marveled that she had never seen God described as a deep but dazzling darkness--isn't He supposed to be the Light?-- anywhere but on Alfred's stone. Oh, the sun blowing its celestial trumpet, eyes crossed in effort! And that banner: DEATH IS UNDONE BY LOVE

Well, if you've ever lost someone who lives in your heart and thoughts every single day (DOD) what can you do but wipe your eyes at that?

 William Alfred, who left us in 1999, just as my bright spirit Liam entered. I like his choice of "Teacher" instead of "Professor."

For those who have trouble deciphering, it says:

There is in God (some say)

 A deep but dazzling darkness-

O for that night! where I in him

Might live invisible and dim.

Right up there with my favorite stones in this magical place.

There is the stone of a woman who was a book illustrator in the 1960's--so clearly indicated by the stylized birds that dance across her slate. Very Leonard Baskin, by my appraisal. Very beautiful. It overlooks Spectacle Pond, where I first heard the burbling song of a ruby-crowned kinglet.

Birds are everywhere in Mount Auburn; this is why I first came here, to watch them. I could barely see the stones for the warblers, vireos and tanagers.  Now, having seen a surfeit of birds, I still come here for them, and everything. 

Oh look. Who's been here?

Last spring's robin, of course. A robin would do that.

My Mount Auburn

One of the places that got me through college was Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was my quiet place, my green open space, and the beautiful monuments were part of a landscape that inspired peace and contemplation in me--something I sorely needed as a break from dorm life. Now, when I visit Cambridge, I leave a day to walk there with my dear dear friend Kris, who gathers up all the best little bits of the cemetery and gives them to me as she hurries from stone to stone, lightmoment to lightmoment.

Now Kris is very camera-shy, and she has perfected a quick sidestep when one is pointed even remotely in her direction, but I lured her into a photo under the pretense of showing her what the Canon G-11 (now G-12) can do. Hah. Gotcha, little elf.

I have been to Mount Auburn in almost every atmospheric condition; fog, rain, summer light and autumn gold; even winter's monochrome, but I never want to go there again without Kris. It would be like going with my eyes closed.

We always visit the argonaut. No, ammonite, says the ever alert Boneman. Science Chimp, Chimped! What a lovely thing to make of stone.

Here it is in October. His spouse, with oak leaves and a shamrock. All these recurring natural motifs have meaning, much of it lost on us modern mortals. I love looking at them and wondering, knowing there are years of study in unraveling it all.

I love Mount Auburn in all seasons. But  my October visit there was beyond perfect. Kris and I were skipping all our Class of 1980 activities, all the panels and encounter groups, to make our own kind of  spiritual journey, and pay homage to our favorite space in this fairest of fair cities. It had to be done. The bluegold day, the shaded passages, the glimmering leaves were calling us.

I pressed my lens up against stone Mary, her delicate features protected by her rock-hard hood,

and clucked over poor noseless Jesus. Acid urban rains have not been kind to him. There is a sense, looking at these monuments so clearly meant to last forever, that they will not be here that much longer. A sense that they need to be appreciated now, while they still may be read and deciphered.

For here are some of the finest examples of the stonecarver's art, standing out in the hard rain and snow. This Civil War tableau ripples with fluid, artfully draped life, yet is hard, frozen to the touch. I borrowed this winter shot from an earlier visit, because I love this so much.

And the dogs. The faithful graveyard dogs. I always well up as I lay my hand on their cool stone craniums, murmur my greeting to them.

A fool for animals, whether living or graven.

Especially ones that wait alert for their loved one's return, all year round. 

Perhaps one day there will be a Boston terrier of stone on a little plot in Whipple, Ohio. Or, as I think about it,  a stone Zick, recumbent but alert, on an even smaller plot. Come on, Baker. Let's go for a run, see what's doin' in the Whipple cemetery.

Back to Autumn

 I have had enough of snow, of this monochrome world. I'm going back to autumn, November 11, to be exact, when most trees were bare but the sun coughed, rose briefly in its deathbed and gave up one last fervent seventy-degree day. On a weekend, no less. Ahhh. Let's go, kids.

Let's go to Dean's Fork and ride our bikes over the ruts and puddles and through the crackly leaves.

 Let's admire the old house that's leaning into the hill, the house that became a barn that became a corral

and now is home to nothing but mice and phoebes and snakes.

Let's marvel at the cerulean sky and what's left of the fiery leaves. Park our bikes and walk awhile.

Let's look at the light of this hour.

We'll sit in the road that nobody much uses and compose. We'll make poems and pictures with scattered light, sticks and trails through the leaves.

We'll compose pictures around a giant foreground dog.

Who suddenly sits to scratch his eye with a deft toenail. Kuff kuff kuff kuff kuff. How does he do it?

You'll walk in and out of the pictures, not guessing your bear-brown outfit is perfect for the setting.

And you'll sit and breathe and soak up the last of the November sun. Your sunglasses, simply criminal, for they hide your ice-gray eyes.

But you like them, and I can't tell you anything any more.

You, young boy, will run to find a stick to tempt your doggie;

hold it above his head in the universal invitation to play.

You'll whirl and laugh and he will, too.

Until the swift chop when he takes it and breaks it.

Then asks for another. He promises not to break this one but you know he lies.

A day so perfect, we must go back

Sharing the light, the log, the dog, the sun and the Snap Pea Crisps

and a happiness so simple and pure that it might flit right by unappreciated, like a small yellow butterfly

on the last warm day in November


Unless we noticed.

Happy New Year. Resolution: To make my own weather in 2011.