[2Jedismom]

I can picture the cemetery! My great grandparents on my grandmother's side are buried in one that sounds similar. They both died within days of each other when my grandmother was 9. (There was a big flu epidemic with is still talked about today. Even the doctor died.)

Anyway, the first time I saw the place it was just a pasture with a fence around it. It was before we moved to Oklahoma and I stood in that cemetary and remembered my grandmother saying she "stood in the cemetery and looked out over the hills and wondered what would become of her." I stood right there, looking out at the same hills, almost a century later. (My grandma died almost 20 years ago...this just happened about 4 years ago.)

Anyway, the last time I was out there, it was all fixed up. They had mowed and cleaned it and put up nice gates. But there are wild roses growing there that I want to get a cutting of.

[HairOfTheDog]

This cemetery was once the churchyard cemetery for the little church that was the focal point of this old Scandinavian Lutheran community. Perched at the top of a hill about a half mile from our beach place which was my grandparents' place. They moved the church to a new bigger site long ago, and the little cemetery remains there. That community has such great roots.

Dan, the story I tell above (5657) is the reason I love Garrison Keillor and his News from Lake Wobegon. He speaks of my family mostly departed now. That event could be straight out of one of his stories. Whenever I go there I am in fact, in his stories, down to the old Norwegian and American flags we raise on the flagpole to the women and their potato salad to the old farts leaning on their rakes and shooting the breeze. I don't think you have to be from an old Lutheran Norwegian family to get it, but I am sure it helps!