Every morning I run by this cemetery and ponder the lives of those who were laid to rest here. This country is covered in tall grasses, and there is a path worn by many kinds of feet. Ball cactus blooms burst open, wild sweet roses, delicate pink and robust yellow and white iris stand in bunches and batches. The old gate was rusted and looking around there are stone markers, dates, names, verses and one small stone with a carved lamb curled around the top.
I am drawn through the gate to this one–a child, a boy who barely touched this Earth, then left. He shouldn’t have gone, being loved so much even as he was torn from the fabric of their lives. This stone, old and crumbling is all they had of him.
There are many young children, babies buried here. The years are 1800’s and I think about the lack of medicine, medical attention out here and in tha
t time. There are mothers and babies side-by-side, clearly having died in childbirth. One whole family of children who all died the same day–we’ve heard it was a fire.
It is a place of rest. The stories of the lives are loud and want to be heard. I find myself wishing, in the dawn, that someone was here to tell me about these people and how they lived.
I turn there, stretch a bit, and run home with the shorn golden stubble shining as the sun comes over the horizon. 
I feel those same things when I drive by a cemetery. I used to walk Yum Yum and B.G. through the cemetery by our old house on 48th Ave. The gate on our side was broken so I could just walk the dogs in that way. So many markers on that north side dated to the flu epidemic back in the early 1900s. So many Omahans gone at once…most of those markers were eroded by wind and time. But I’ll bet there are stories that long to be told.
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