Home Is ...
I read a line in a blog this morning that caught me: "home is where your graves are."
And then I thought about how very spread out my "home" is.
My grandmother in a flat, barren cemetery outside of Independence, Kansas, buried alongside her mother, father and three of her sisters. My grandfather five miles away, in a wooded plot, buried with his people, my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, both with insignia on their graves marking them as civil war veterans (my great grandfather ran away at 14 to join the Union Army, where his father already served).
My infant sister, buried in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
My father, in Xenia, Ohio, a grave I've never seen. My mother, in Everett, Washington, in a hilly gravesite which had a space for my stepfather. Hope she kicked him when he landed.
Wonder where I'll end up? Hopefully ashes spread in the places I've lived and loved. Ann Arbor and Seattle. Maybe a few teaspoons in Kansas.
posted by mireille at 11:04 AM
5 Comments:
So you haven't been at his funeral. I was wondering what I'd have done in your place, whether I'd want to be there to know and see that one part of the story is now really, really over or not but I couldn't tell.
In "One Hundred Years of Solitude" they say what you say. Their new village is not really their home until they have not one grave there. I have graves all over here but I feel no home.
I can see your inheritors travelling the country with a box and a teaspoon. Hope they'll talk about you a lot, and laugh a lot!
11:59 PM
A, Road Trip! Have ashes, will travel! xoxo
10:19 AM
Mireille, this post reminds me of 100 Years of Solitude where the people weren't committed to Maconda as long as no one died there.
12:28 PM
My family is scattered too...some, literally. I have always loved old graveyards -- one of the first things I do when I travel to a new city is find all the old graveyards -- but I've no family of my own to visit.
2:39 PM
There is a space for me in my parents' grave in a beautiful hilltop cemetery overlooking Nice. The view is out of this world. I do want to join them there.
No one knows where the rest of my family are buried: probably in pits and desecrated graves in Russia and Poland.
5:50 PM
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