That pile of rocks over Linda's shoulder was part of her grandparents' home.

A Season's Change and Remembering the Dead

It isn't quite leaf season in the Roanoke Valley, but on the edges, there are some mighty fine-looking trees. Today, LindaK and I went out to Franklin County on her family's ancient farm to wander the fields, cross the streams, climb the damn hills and investigate a graveyard that holds her ancestors.

The graveyard was a good point of interest, going back, as it does, at least 200 yards and mostly memorializing silently. There are only four gravestones in the small cemetery with headstones and the people under them were born in about 1850. Other graves, those unmarked, but for a flat piece of river rock or shale are more sad than spooky, especially those small stones marking the resting place of children, some tiny.

It was a quiet walk for both of us as Linda thought who those long-lost people might be, how they survived, how they dealt with the deaths of probably half the children they bore. But the beauty of life, death and the seasons were all around us. 

Here are some photos from the walk.