David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Roadside Grave

Imagine having a gravestone planted in front of your home just a few yards from the door, and so close to the road that it’s easily seen by passersby. That’s exactly what you’ll find along the curved walkway to an eighteenth-century house on Merryall Road in New Milford, Connecticut. Is it historically intriguing, a responsibility to care for, or creepy? Maybe it’s all of that and more. At the very least, it must tie the record for the world’s smallest cemetery, if you can use that term for a single grave.

Situated at the base of a mature tree, it’s a simple stone with an arched top, stained and darkened by more than two centuries of New England weather. “Ruby, wife of Grishom W. French, died May 14, 1812,” reads the inscription. It set my curiosity afire.

Home burials, I knew, were not uncommon two hundred years ago, but were usually behind a house or at the edge of what was once a cultivated field. Typically, the plot had several family members and was often surrounded by a stone wall. Why was Ruby alone and so close to the road? Who was Ruby French and of what did she die? Could it have been a disease like smallpox that required a quick interment? Was there an actual body buried on the spot, or was it just a memorial monument?

Time Made Visible

I saw time. It became almost palpable. I was wandering in a cemetery and spotted a tree that had swallowed three headstones. Jolted by an epiphany I don’t fully understand, I found something beautiful, and I can’t let go.

Cemeteries grow my time-sense. Neither clocks nor machines by which we can travel beyond the present, they are nevertheless places where the passage of years, decades, and centuries are manifest. Abounding in dates and ages which measure human life from infants to centenarians, they are also time capsules of culture in which typography, carving, sculpture, and epitaphs illustrate an evolution in the way communities engage the chronological limits of their world. They are rich with time-binding symbols like crosses, soul effigies, Masonic squares and compasses, and willow-and-urn designs that connect generations.

While consecrated to human corporeal mortality and spiritual eternity, other time scales appear in cemeteries from ephemeral flowers or snow in season, to long-lasting chunks and slabs of ancient geology in the form of inscribed monuments. But when exposed to water, frost, wind, and sun even the most durable materials erode. Sandstone flakes away, marble melts in acidic rainfall, and hard igneous granite weathers and fades.

Webster defines “time” as “a period during which something (as an action, process, or condition) exists or continues.” It’s an abstraction, an intangible phenomenon. It can be measured by celestial events or clocks from hourglasses to digital readouts. Although my life is largely regulated by time, it was nothing I truly visualized or could touch until I saw that tree.

It’s a large red maple with a lichen crusted colonial-era headstone partially buried within the trunk revealing only the left half of the inscription. On the tree’s other side, it has fully embraced the front of another gravestone so that the uninscribed back looks like an elfin-sized door fitted into the bark. A third headstone is caught among the roots, and appears to grow out of them.

I’d seen trees clutching tombstones before, but never three at once. Here was a collision of timescales—human, cultural, sylvan, and geologic. I don’t know how long the tree will continue growing around the stones, but eventually it will die. Once released from that woody grip, remnants of the sandstone will persist, but the carving inscribed in memory of the dead will likely be erased. Perhaps those names and dates are preserved in some church or government record on fragile paper or in ghostly digital form. Carving in stone may be the proverbial metaphor for permanence, but it doesn’t pass the test of time.

In a whirling, time-bending second, I found ordinary objects exposing a dizzying convergence of the instant and infinite. Time became something I could reach out and grab, at least for a moment.

Cemetery as Road Map

Sometimes a cemetery reads like a road map. I often walk the aisles of New England’s ancient graveyards where brownstone, granite, slate and marble monuments are engraved with names as familiar to me as those of my neighbors. I might not know anyone called Hollister, Talcott, or Nye, but those monikers are frequently in mind. I see them all the time. They are emblazoned  on street signs. I drive on roads that remind me of these early colonial families, clues to a past that most people don’t even know exists.

I’d long had a notion of graveyard as gazetteer, but it hit me with particular force when visiting the Old Eastbury Burying Ground in Glastonbury, Connecticut. It’s a relatively small cemetery that until little more than two hundred years ago was associated with a church that stood across the street. It’s a simple country graveyard in a suburbanizing area, the stones skewed with centuries of frost and often splotched with gray-green lichen. There hasn’t been a burial since the Civil War era.

My wife Mary and I walked slowly on uneven ground of sparse grass and moss. We paid our respects to veterans of the Revolution, and were awed by the skill of long-ago carvers whose pinwheels, scrollwork and haunting profiled faces are a high art too little admired. But as we read epitaphs of long years and accomplishments, or lives tragically cut short, I felt an eerie acquaintance with the surnames engraved on the stones. An unease percolated in my mind, but Mary didn’t feel it. Then I realized that having once lived just a couple miles away, these names were as familiar as a commute to work, trip to the grocery, or drive to visit friends. I knew these names not as people, but as places, as roads that took me where I needed to go.

Old Eastbury has about a score more than 300 known graves. By my rough count, there are 58 different family names, a remarkable 23 of which are also local street names. These range from Griswold Street, which has a busy corner with a shopping center and chain drugstore, to Goodale Hill Road, part of which passes through a state forest. Wickham Road pours out onto a well trafficked state road in front of the sprawling modern high school. Hubbard Street hosts eighteenth century houses and the historical society. Risley Street runs in an area of modest homes on small lots, while Weir Street passes larger residences on wooded parcels.

Fresh Spin on an Old Top

A Toy with a Story
A titanium dreidel! Sounds crazy, no? And to further paraphrase Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof, in our little state of Connecticut with its heritage of precision manufacture using high tech metals, such an innovation might well be considered, dare I say, a tradition.

Simply put, a dreidel (sevivon in modern Hebrew) is four sided top. But unlike the usual spinning child’s toy, this top is fraught with symbolism of an ancient miracle. Dreidel is played during Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights. It commemorates the ancient revolt for religious freedom in Jerusalem by the Maccabees who triumphed over superior Greek forces in 166 BCE, and the single days’ worth of oil that burned for eight days in the rededicated Temple’s menorah (candelabrum) after the desecrated holy place had been recovered. Each side of a dreidel is inscribed with a Hebrew letter that together stands for the phrase “a great miracle happened there” (or, in Israel, “a great miracle happened here”).

Stepping Inside Imagination at Quirky Boothe Park

Dead over 70 years, I feel as if I’ve met Stratford, Connecticut’s Boothe Brothers. As I walked through their 32-acre family farm become a public park, their collection of eclectic and eccentric structures on a grassy hillside above the Housatonic River radiated like remnant fragments of their large-than-life personalities. I found humor in a miniature lighthouse, spirituality in an   outdoor basilica, playfulness in a 44-sided blacksmith shop, and something inscrutable in a redwood-log building called the Technocratic Cathedral. Mix an offbeat Sturbridge Village with a good dose of Disneyland showmanship and you have Boothe Memorial Park.

On a sun-washed August day, my wife Mary and I entered the grounds through a rose garden kaleidoscopic with blooms and sweetly scented. The brothers are said to have loved flowers, and this garden planted by the park friends group memorializes their passion for roses.

Advertising as Unexpected Art: Take a Seat

We were gobsmacked! Standing in a dimly lit afterhours storefront during a post-dinner stroll in Manchester, Vermont, my wife Mary and I stood mesmerized by a constellation of angled orange  tubing that seemed to float behind the plate glass. V-shaped and somewhat triangular pieces seemed almost lit from within, and the abstract geometric called to mind a 1960s blacklight poster rendered in three dimensions. Below the tubular constellation, several cats lounged and wandered on a hardwood floor.

It was a late September evening at dusk, and we stood practically hypnotized in front of Circa50 at 4898 Main Street for a good five minutes. The window also caught the eyes of other passersby who were momentarily captivated before moving on. When we’d arrived, a young bearded man was staring into the space transfixed. “Amazing!” was all he could muster. When we left, his eyes were still focused on the glowing geometry. It was hard tearing ourselves away, for after a few moments the pieces almost seemed to dance.

Loving the Weeds We Hate

I like weeds. That’s pretty strong language for an avid flower gardener. After all, I spend good deal of energy and time each spring and summer yanking spotted spurge, lambsquarters, and other invaders out of perennial beds around my home. Let’s just say I admire them. They’re tenacious, adaptable, persistent. They overflow with life force.

Every year I lose assiduously cultivated, even pampered plants to disease, drought, insects and causes I can’t fathom. But inevitably, the same weeds return year after year with unbridled vigor. They may be obnoxious and annoying and cause me backaches from plucking them out of the soil, but on some level, I applaud their energy and regenerative power.

Tornadoes of Birds

Birds! Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands or more swirling, diving and swooping above the Connecticut River. It was described to me as an avian whirlwind, a rainfall with feathers. “I have never witnessed a spectacle more dramatic than the twisting tornadoes of tree swallows I saw plunging from the sky,” wrote the late world-renowned ornithologist and artist Roger Tory Peterson. That was endorsement enough. Holy Capistrano! I had to see for myself.

Late last September, my wife Mary and I slowly motored up the Connecticut River with a couple of friends. It was near dusk. Their boat was a small rectangular craft, not much more than a floating platform with seats. Starting out from Pilgrim Landing in Old Lyme, we headed upstream to the north end of Goose Island, a low marshy oasis thick with phragmites, a tall reed with feathery plumes. Here we cut the engine and waited for the swallows to appear. We were not alone. At least a dozen people in colorful kayaks shared the vigil, some with hors d'oeuvres and cups of wine.