Cemeteries

There are two different routes I can take to work in the morning one takes about a minute or two longer than the other. Right now they are constructing a new home for the president of our local university on the route that takes the least amount of time and they had to blast for about a week in order to dig the foundation. Every time they blast they have to hold traffic for about 7 minutes so for the last couple of weeks I have been taking the longer way to work. It takes me through a beautiful cemetery which is right across the street from where I work. Probably the highest point in the city. My parents are buried there and all of my relatives, grandparents on both sides and aunts and uncles and even cousins, friends too. This morning as I drove through it was a bit foggy due to the cool rainy air and the warm ground from the warm weather we have been having. The men who maintain the cemetery were just beginning there mowing for the day. They ride on lawn mowers that they stand on rather than sit down on and they were dressed in their bright yellow rain gear, hoods and all. As I drove through the cemetery it look like something from another planet moving around the stones in the cemetery, a little eerie but also beautiful.
Our house is situated on a street that leads directly into a cemetery, not the same one mentioned above but a different one. This cemetery is also very popular and well maintained. There is another cemetery behind our house. The very first morning of the first night we slept here I got up from bed walked into the upstairs hall and looked out the window that looks towards the back cemetery. It was October and we have a lot of mornings in October when the fog lays very heavy on the hill above the city where we live. There were times growing up when I would arrive at the front of my high school, which also sits on top of a hill overlooking the city, and I literally could not see the school sitting right beyond the fog. So anyway I looked out the upstairs window and all I could see were these tombstones peeking up through the heavy fog, it was very eerie and I thought to myself wow do I really want to live here. The cemetery behind us is very very old, there is no fence that leads borders our property from the cemetery. If it is maintained at all it is done so by the city and only if they have manpower and time to do it. So usually it is overgrown. This year on Earth Day a group of local neighbors got together and went in the cemetery and cleaned up and cut a lot of bushes and trees, most of which had fallen do to last years ice storm. We all got use to living among these beautiful cemeteries and the tombstones. My daughter and her friends used the cemetery to ride their bikes and we use the rolling roadways to walk and others use it to walk their dogs. My daughter use to love to go and read the names and dates. There is one stone that is very tall and the names of children who died very young from one family and all of the boys names were Paul. Very odd.
My husband takes care of locking and unlocking the big wrought iron gates that lead into the cemetery at the end of our street. He volunteered to do this because when we first moved here we noticed that after dark there was a lot of traffic going in and out of cemetery when there really should not have been. We believed it was mostly young people looking for a place to hang out. The caretaker was also concerned because he could see evidence of partying way in the back of the cemetery that leads into a wooded areas along a creek. So the Board of Directors gave my husband a key and he is the gate keeper.
Tonight after the gate was locked we noticed some cars gathering in front of the gate. Looking closer we realized that there were two police cars there. At that point the doorbell rang and it was the city police. They know my husband takes care of locking and locking. So my husband went out and they said that someone hit a dog and the dog took off into the cemetery so the owners of the dog wanted to get in with the police and use the police big spotlights to see if they could find the dog. The dog wasn't hit very hard, he was able to run away. My husband unlocked the gate but they did not have any luck finding the dog. Hopefully he will make his way home.