Grave Keeper

When I was little--up until I was about twelve--my mother was the church custodian. All that meant for me was that I spent a lot of Thursdays or Saturdays at our church.  (Before Mama went back to work she cleaned on Thursdays. After she went back to work--when I was ten or so--she cleaned on Saturdays.) I roamed that land like it was mine, inside and out. But I rarely went into the cemetery alone. Partially because we'd been warned not to and partially because it kind of scared me.

As a junior in college, I took a photography class and one of the assignments was a photo series, as in, a series of similar subjects. Some people did trees. Some people did dogs. I did this cemetery. I went up there in my little bucket of dust Cavalier and spent an entire afternoon snapping shot after shot of the headstones in this cemetery. I wasn't even a member there at the time. We'd long ago left that church and moved on but that sense of ownership over it lingered even as it seemed a stranger to me by then.

I don't recall what grade I made on my series assignment. Probably an A--not so much because I was a brilliant photographer as it was that the teacher didn't give a rat's patootie. So long as we turned in something slightly better than utter crap we got A's. No wonder I never learned anything about composition.

But that day in the cemetery was so peaceful. So serene. Maybe a little guilty as though I wasn't supposed to be there even though technically it's open to the public. And I was proud of that assignment. Though probably wildly unoriginal, it was one of the more fun photography projects I tackled that semester.

Now I'm back at this church of my childhood. I returned to it's fold around five years ago. For a long time it felt weird, this place I remembered from a child's eye. It was the same and yet so different. The people were the same but some were new. Some had left that I knew and some had died. Some are at rest in this cemetery. And as with most things in life, I've come full circle with this church. While there is no paid custodian any longer, the members sign up for a couple or three months each year to clean the buildings and I signed up for March.

Once again I'm free to roam this land as though I own it. Now that I am the Grave Keeper, as one of my fellow church members so kindly calls me, I felt drawn to this little parcel of land. An acre or three of long gone distant relatives, kindred spirits and fellow Christians.

Once again, I took my camera with me. I didn't take a lot of photos this time. Just the ones you see here. What I did do was spend some time with the dead. Picking up stray silk flowers. Straightening fallen sculptures left at a couple of headstones. Carted off a dead potted plant. I spoke to the headstones of the people I recall knowing from childhood, offering quiet hellos. I discovered the final resting place of a few people I hadn't realized were buried there. Mostly I just walked quietly through the yard, soaking in the unseasonably warm March sun, thanking God for bringing me home.