Wilf Rock

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; Thus unlamented let me die; Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lie.When I was in Grad School in the early 1980s, I was trying to get a novel handle on the [Euro]peopling of New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. I did A Lot of reading about pre-colonial demographics. I also put in a lot of field-work foot-miles from Cape Breton to Cape Cod in the East to New York and up the Hudson River valley to Montreal and the St Lawrence. Starting in to Year Three of this project my boss advised me to enroll in an evening course at the Harvard Extension School. It was something like "Grave markers and iconography in colonial New England cemeteries". As reg'lar readers may suspect, I have a low threshold for "gosh how interesting, do tell me more". I can't remember any details but if you plot "flying skulls" across time and space it looks like this fashion for memorializing the beloved dead in this way swept like a wave across New England…