Vigil lights

Let’s talk today about my idea of creepy. I used to live in a little town called Franklin, Ohio. If you left town on Main Street going south, just after you crossed the railroad tracks, there was a cemetery up on the hill to your right next to a little church. During the day, it looked like a perfectly normal southwestern Ohio country graveyard – rows upon rows of tombstones, not a lot of statues and no mausoleums that I remember. At night, the place was so filled with solar lamp stakes, it glowed. In my humble opinion, cemeteries should not glow in the dark. I still drive down to that part of Ohio with regularity, and there are a number of roadside cemeteries along the way that suffer (again, my opinion) from an overabundance of those lights. I guess they are called vigil lights, but I don’t care for them. Unnatural light emanating from the ground just in front of a tombstone makes a cemetery less inviting, not more, and I imagine that teenagers out looking to play destructive pranks are more likely to notice dimly lit cemetery than a completely dark one. So, please, if I can make one request – when it comes time to determine what to do with my earthly remains, choose a cemetery that does not permit vigil lights.

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