Kirtland, Ohio, I have discovered, has a cemetery for each point of the compass. I wrote about Kirtland North Cemetery back in the summer, and I visited Kirtland South and Kirtland West on our last bright, summery weekend day. I didn’t find Kirtland West by looking for it – I was just driving to Kirtland South Cemetery and saw a little graveyard along the road and decided to stop because it looked interesting. It was not much bigger than the size of a residential lot, and there is no sign. The “parking area” is a little bit of gravel mixed into the grass where there is a break in the wooden fence.
The earliest graves I saw marked were from the 1820s, and the latest was from 1959. I’d been there maybe ten minutes when, to my surprise, another SUV pulled up behind me. Putting aside large, active cemeteries like Lake View, most of my cemetery expeditions are conducted without seeing another person on the cemetery grounds, including groundskeepers. A family of mom, dad, a son about 10 and a daughter a little younger got out of the SUV, looking a little surprised to see me. And then I saw the GPS in the father’s hand.
“Geocaching?”
“Yes, you, too?”
“No, but I saw the GPS in your hand. I write a cemetery blog.”
I continued to take photos while they looked for the geocache, which I overheard them remark had been there over a year by now.
Then I pointed out a few of the interesting things I had noted in the cemetery, like the remarkably well-preserved tombstone from 1827 I posted about this past week, and the grave in the back corner with a Confederate veteran marker holding a small flag blazoned with the stars and bars.
I finished my photos and we all moved to leave at about the same time, and one of the kids asked the mother a question, and the mother replied that the cemetery was very peaceful. She was right. The little plot of land was calming, and felt still even as the autumn winds of northeast Ohio were blowing my hair every which way.
A Grave Concern 