A Fascination with Graveyards
The November moon that night, a persistent blushing sliver, winked at me between mossy branches of great oaks lining the cobbled street.
By all accounts, I suppose the walk must have been eerie for some of the others. But any frightening novelty was lost on me as we skimmed the hallowed edges of the tombstone-laden, memory-rich ground.
The city had grown dark, kissed with the warm sparkle of Savannah’s famous lamplights, and I stared hard into the cemetery, past where the light was warm, turned instead to a cooler shade, part moonlight, part something else.
The ghost tour had gone long enough now that my shoes rubbed blisters on the backs of my heels, and the cold, salty air burned my nose and dried my throat.
But I wasn’t ready to leave yet.
The serenity of the place, the mysteries sleeping there, begged I linger as long as I could.
Surely, if any unsettled souls cared to wander the grounds of the cemetery or the streets of Savannah beyond, surely it wasn’t over a misplaced head or revenge doled out centuries too late.
This wasn’t the burial place of tin men, heartless and void of story. The ones who lay here possessed singing voices once, running feet, and lips made for kissing.
Here was a place of rest and remembrance, the ground a spongy bookshelf, filled to bursting with volumes closed, but carefully remembered. Destined to open again.
For me, the truest legends rested beneath the soil of the graveyard.
Blame it on the famous mystique of Savannah, but I’ve held a fascination with graveyards
Give me a poet or an author lost for words, and I’ll direct them to the nearest cemetery. Give me a stunted painter or a perplexed architect, for that matter, because there’s just something about graveyards that gets the mind to leaping, racing with the sweetness of the moment, lungs ripe with air and appreciation for our own unique and irreplaceable stories.
