David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Ghost Cemetery

Perpetual Care? Forget it. And “Rest in Peace” might as well be “rest in pieces.” Waterbury’s Grand Street Cemetery is just a ghost of a graveyard, at least if you define “ghost” as something invisible that nevertheless has a presence. Located in the heart of the city, the public Silas Bronson Library and adjacent Library Park with its walkways, benches and bandshell sit atop a cemetery unseen.

This subterranean secret remained unknown to me for years even though I’d been to the library for poetry readings and had walked through the park on occasion. But driving along Meadow Street one day on my way to the railroad station, I saw embedded in a brick wall a series of rectangular masonry tablets that looked like gravestones. I stopped the car and got out. From the sidewalk, I could see they were indeed headstones from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There were about two-dozen of them, most in weather-darkened marble, others in brownstone. A few were carved with soul effigies, those winged faces of the puritan past. Even with the sun behind me, they were faded and hard to read.

Garden of the Dead

It feels like a fairytale place where you might expect elves to dance at night. Indeed, spirits may linger in this spacious outdoor room with its walls of layered greenery and ceiling of sky. But expect any spectral creatures to move as smoothly as silk, for this is the private burial ground of the Cheneys, once masters of the nation’s largest silk mills.

A narrow shrub-lined path leads to a grassy glade surrounded by trees. Located in the northeast corner of Manchester, Connecticut’s East Cemetery and surrounded by a palisade of vegetation, the Cheney ground is all but invisible from the municipal cemetery. With soft grass, dappled shade from hemlocks and other mature trees, glossy-leaved rhododendrons, and islands of myrtle, lily-of-the-valley and other groundcovers, it’s more like a garden than a graveyard. In fact, the simple slab headstones are banished to the perimeter, often half hidden in, and almost seeming to grow out of the shrubbery. At first, a visitor doesn’t even notice them.

Frozen Time Among Tombstones

To step in, is to step back. A haunted atmosphere permeates Old Cove Cemetery in East Haddam, Connecticut, not because it’s a graveyard populated with ghosts of those buried, but because time seems to have frozen centuries ago.

Located a couple tenths of a mile down a narrow dirt byway lacking a street sign or name on a map, you don’t find Old Cove by happenstance. You have to know it’s there, to seek it out. A few driveways branch off the tree-and-brush-edged road where a couple structures are barely visible during leaf-out. Suddenly an opening appears, insular and quiet, dotted with gravestones and surrounded by a palisade of forest. Established in the 1690s, “this is as close as the twentieth century can come to showing what a colonial burying ground actually looked like,” wrote scholar James A. Slater in the 1996 revision to his epic book on colonial cemeteries of eastern Connecticut. Two decades into the twenty-first century, his words are even more profound.

Hail to the Cheese: A Presidential Snack for Inaguration Day

A Pressing Discovery
At noon on January 20, 2021, as President-elect Biden takes the oath of office, I will mark the moment with a few slices of locally sourced cheese as I watch the televised ceremony. It’s not just that the commander-in-chief might be called “the big cheese,” that politics is a cheesy business, or that frequently photographed new presidents tend to smile as if saying the obligatory word as their image is snapped. Rather, my snack choice is less about symbolism than homage to historical precedent. Ever since the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1802, few foods have received such chief executive notoriety.

I stumbled on this confluence of cheddar and history while on a summer trip to the Berkshires of Massachusetts that featured visits to contemporary art museum MASS MoCA in North Adams and a baseball game at Pittsfield’s venerable Waconah Park. Traveling north on Route 8, my wife Mary and I pulled into the small community of Cheshire in hopes of finding a cup of coffee. Across from the post office on a sliver of grass at the corner of Church and School Streets an unusual monument caught my eye. I couldn’t resist. With a quick turn of the wheel, I abruptly pulled over.

Shaded beneath maples and flanked by a couple park benches was what looked like a large, old fashioned hand-turned cider press. Somewhat boxy and fabricated of weathered concrete, what it lacked in elegance and beauty it made up for in unusual and curious materials and design. Affixed to the front was a bronze plaque bearing a bas relief of a stern gentlemen attired in the fashion of the early nineteenth century. Below was an inscription rendered a bit difficult to read from blue-green drips of corrosion. The text explained that the monument, placed in 1940 by the Sons of the American Revolution, was in the form of a cheese press.

The plaque depicted Elder John Leland, described as an “eloquent preacher, beloved pastor, and influential patriot” who “despite opposition of every other pulpit in Massachusetts, carried every vote in Cheshire” for Thomas Jefferson. On New Year’s Day 1802, in the East Room of the White House where foreign diplomats, members of the supreme court, and congressmen had gathered, Leland presented the new president with “the Big Cheshire Cheese weighing 1,255 lbs.”

Black Civil War Soldier at a Cemetery’s Outskirts

Bodies are not all that are buried in cemeteries. Stories with their juxtapositions and confluences lie among the monuments, but are mostly as invisible as bones returning to dust. Narratives connecting or separating the interred are often forgotten to all except relatives or history aficionados. But sometimes a visitor is serendipitously struck by a splicing or conjunction of circumstance making a statement about the past that is telling to the present.

Hillside Cemetery in Unionville, Connecticut is a steep wedge of land rising above the intersection of three busy roads. A circular concrete drive embedded with large chunks of aggregate separates a grassy inner sphere of gravesites from an outer ring of memorials on high ground at a forested edge. The slope has required terracing, resulting in a series of picturesque retaining walls and associated steps that make for an intriguing series of levels and alcoves.

Signs of the (COVID-19) Times

Popping up like mushrooms on a late summer lawn, thank-you signs acknowledging essential workers have appeared in front of houses, businesses, theaters, government buildings and elsewhere. They’ve been posted in windows, attached to trees, scribbled on sidewalks with chalk, and hung from banners on structures of all types. Even those of us who do not wear our proverbial hearts on our sleeves have no hesitation displaying them on placards outside our homes or businesses.

Most of these signs of gratitude and compassion are simply in the form of hearts. Many say “thank you,” some have hopeful messages like “together,” or acknowledge first responders, essential workers, or those “on the front lines.” While many commercial signs get the message across in a beautiful and heartfelt way, it doesn’t take a long drive to spot homemade signs of all shapes and sizes that express high levels of creativity and community spirit. They can bring as much color and joy into these crisis darkened times as Christmas lights do in seasonal darkness.

Tasting Pine

Taste a pine tree? Sounds a little eco-foraging crazy. But white pines delight the senses in so many other ways, why not have a taste?

They catch the eye with bluish-green branches rising in tiers, towering pagoda-like over other trees. And no scent says “woodsy” like crisp, clean, calming white pine whose odor has found its way into oils, sprays and other commercial products. Their soft, pliable, air brushed needles sound with a distinctive whispering whoosh in the wind, and the feel of their curved cylindrical cones with flexible scales intrigue the hand. I was hungry to complete the sensory circuit and have a taste.

Verse Surprise at Roadside

It remained a mystery for years. Close to the road, I’d driven by it hundreds of times without stopping. With each passing, my curiosity only grew about this rectangular bronze plaque weathered to verdigris and perched on a tall, rusticated granite post. Embossed with a series of words unreadable at the 45 to 50 miles-per-hour flow of traffic, I tried slowing to a crawl when no cars were following, but the writing remained illegible. Probably thousands of people pass it every day. I’d be shocked if even a handful know what the sign says.

Situated in front of a nineteenth century house on busy U.S. Route 44 about a mile east of the center of bucolic Norfolk, Connecticut, I hesitated to stop because there wasn’t a really a safe place to pull over. Besides, its location right in front of the house where I’d be plainly visible to the occupants gave me a creepy, peeping-Tom kind of feeling. So, despite temptation by the continued itch of curiosity every time I approached, the enigma stood and begged for attention.

Then, something changed. At last I stopped. Though I was in a hurry to get somewhere, I turned the wheel hard and pulled onto the grass in front of the plaque. The white clapboard house with cornice returns, stone chimney, and a side ell with a porch had a “For Sale” sign out front. The place appeared vacant. I had no excuse.