I’ve been increasing my trips to cemeteries lately for two reasons. One is that my schedule has freed up with the wedding reception over and fewer nearby events for the SCA for a little while. The other is that winter is coming. You can see it every time you walk into the cemetery and see the blaze of colored leaves hanging off the trees and creating a brilliant blanket around the monuments.
I don’t necessarily like the cold, but I like the look of winter, even in cemeteries. I like the gentle undulating waves of windblown snow and the branches curving slightly under soft white weight. Snow and ice coat everything in quiet and stillness, and when the sun does emerge from behind the gray clouds, the snow glitters like so many diamonds scattered on the ground. Statues and large monuments photograph well in the snow, but it obscures the lower ground-level markers or ices over the words on tombstones. So for material other than just pretty pictures, I have to go when the snow either hasn’t yet fallen or is just a dusting, and in Cleveland, winter looms on the horizon earlier than in other places.
A Grave Concern 