Starting my third week of trying to live an Inspired Life I thought I might just scrap it all. I was tired. Bored with me. Tied up with duty. Why bother?
Because I need to do this. I need to live the life I dream of having, or at least as close as I can come at present.
So I combined duty with necessity. Granny needed to get out of the house for a bit, Mama needed to get out, away from the cares of being a caregiver. She read the paper in the back seat, happy that Granny was satisfied to look out the window at the scenery. The skies were grey, we kept hitting little patches of rain or fog. And then suddenly the sun broke through between showers and the day looked differently to us all.
We got BBQ at a spot we'd discovered last autumn, before we'd all faced their age in terms of recovering from injuries. And then we drove to the next town to sit in the graveyard and have lunch.
Doesn't sound a bit romantic or inspired does it? But this graveyard, all main entrances but one sadly neglected, a little unkempt, a little bit hidden like a secret on the outskirts of town was romantic and intriguing and inspiring.
It was, first of all, just what I've said. A little hidden, a little bit secretive. We found our way to the only maintained entrance which was behind a business and through shrubs long overgrown and there we were in a a graveyard with magnificent monuments, crookedly outlined graves of tettering bricks, little areas sunken in that denoted a grave without a headstone or slab to grace it. It also had many old live oaks with dripping Spanish moss. I could just imagine how spooky that graveyard must seem at night, the trees so thick they'd succesfully block the lights of town from shining into the deep dark depths. And many of the graves were marked with dates of death that went back to the 1860's - 1910.
We rode slowly down the only drive that was clearly marked. We read off names, noted the numerous graves of infants and small children. And Granny, whose memory may be a little fuzzy about who I am (today I was her niece and she calls Mama simply 'Sister') bloomed, telling us of relatives whose names she could recall from the 1920's, pointing out the grave of a cousin who died at age 13, recalling stories about the families whose names were on some of the graves. It was amazing, really, to see how clearly she can recall these things. Many of the stories, Mama and I heard years ago, so we know they are truth.
We spent nearly two hours in that graveyard, driving slowly up and down rough little lanes and backing slowly and carefully in the tight quarters. Had Mama and Granny been able to get out and walk we'd have done that, but as it was we managed to see the majority of the oldest portion of the graveyard. When we found ourselves in a 'new' section where many of the deceased were buried in the 1940's and '50's we went on to drive around the town, relatively unchanged since my childhood, except that many stores are now empty, blankly staring at the street.
The sunshine broke out in fullness when we left town and headed home. We had the pleasure of seeing the sky turn blue, instead of the gray that had become tiresome over the past two weeks. And just as one last little bit of fun thrown in, I turned into a country lane at a stables where a handmade sign reads "FRESH EGGS $1/DOZ." There was a seed and feed store down that lane, with a screened in porch and picnic tables and a fat white hen and dirty speckled rooster sitting proudly on top of one of the tables, and horses neighing and whinnying at the women who came out to ask if they could help us.
We may well have more rain tomorrow, or even tonight, but for the afternoon we've had plenty of sunshine and a bit of family history and some darned good Southern BBQ. It's been a day of the things I love best.
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