Not that I am excessively morbid or remotely funerary in my disposition and overall mentality, but I have and have always had, I suppose, a certain grave (you will, no doubt, forgive the pun) fascination with and the slightest, tiniest, thinnest, barest attraction to cemeteries. Not, of course, that I have often gone to them at night or in the day, though-for that is and was almost never the case. But it is not all cemeteries, though, that I am slightly interested in.
No; not all types of them, indeed.
For instance, it is not the rambling, oft-hilly, verdant, clean and well-maintained and pastoral ones that interest me-no; it is almost assuredly not those kinds. Nor even the small, secluded, grassy, slightly unkempt, gently wooded ones, those that I used to visit once or twice while on scholastic outings (excursions-RE: "field trips") as a youth.
Rather, it is the stark, tiny, dusty, sunbleached, weedy ones that are often located in deserts-like those often crumbling church-adjacent graveyards unprotected from the harsh desert anhydrous sun that are so frequently depicted in American Western films. Like those that I was often subjected to watch on Sundays, my father's one and only day off then, by a father who was almost obsessed with them-Westerns, I mean. Many was the time that I had to watch them, and though at first I reviled them in general and the actor Clint Eastwood in particular (his gruffness, to me even as a child, seemed forced, wooden and irksome...utterly contrived), through much watching of them, I eventually grew to like not only the genre itself, but also Clint Eastwood and his gruff, shambling acting style. However, that is not the point of this essay or memoir.
There is something strangely flabbergasting, focal and entrancing in those sorts of cemeteries, with their drifting herds of nomadic tawny anhydrous tumbleweeds blowing past, and the cattleskulls picked clean and shining viciously in the harsh, austral sunlight. I know that, outside of the ones I have seen in the movies, I have never actually seen or set foot in some possibly Arizonan graveyard, but still they interested me once. Perhaps they even still do. Just as the sumac trees that grow so profusely in Kittery, Maine, in their out-of-place tropicalness; just as they do fascinate me too-or at least, they did as a child, when I was exposed to them. The sumac trees, I mean. Surely other people, especially residents of Kittery itself have noticed the sumacs and their slight resemblance to something overtly tropical? Or, am I the only one who has ever recognized that outlandish yet honest parallel? (I know it is odd to end a note on the note of a question-especially a rhetorical one-but that is what I am doing. I will probably write another note later.)
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