'This Small Piece of Eden'

It was April or early May and the snow was going or gone. A low wall of fieldstones surrounded the cemetery in Schoharie County, N.Y. – one of those artfully assembled walls that last for centuries in the Northeast. Jack Flavin writes of them in his poem “In a Country Cemetery”: “The patient art (that conceals art) of the country mason who built this wall is a silent rebuke to some of the monuments, the wilde enormities, it contains. The granite courses are set into the bank along a slight declivity, and the rings for chaining and winching the stone from the quarry uproad by sledge and ox are still set in the tops.” In the cemetery I visited more than thirty years ago, the epitaphs on the earliest markers had been erased by time and acid rain, and some were tilted by the freeze-buckled earth. The lambs carved on the stones of children were worn headless. The grass, mostly red and white clover, hadn’t yet been mowed and was thick with phlox. Birds sang and the air was fresh. Life felt…