not of graveyard rabbits

Now this here--blogosphere has many circles. We all are attracted to certain themes. I do not want to write on just one topic, and this reduces readership. Sure, i would like to be a ‘professional’ writer. I have not received a penny, yet. In the sixth grade, i sent a question to the newspaper. They carried a column in the funny pages. I received a set of encyclopedia, which really helped me the next six years. But, if you know a lot, the less people care. You can hold two concepts in your mind, and people will approve of the one, and disapprove of the other.

Frank Stanton wrote editorials for the Atlanta Constitution. His daddy went to fight for the confederacy. Stanton was also a lyricist. Some poems he wrote in dialect, others were sentimental with regular spelling. He had been included in anthologies. The one poem, The Graveyard Rabbit begins:

In the white moonlight, where the willow waves, He halfway gallops among the graves— A tiny ghost in the gloom and gleam, Content to dwell where the dead men dream

and then, i think, he goes off into unfamiliar superstition and southern? folklore. Well anyway, someone started a circle of web journals called, Graveyard Rabbits. They are solely devoted to gravestones, cemeteries, and genealogical stuff.

Well, a while back, public television had a cemetery programme. About five graveyards were featured, one very near me, Lake View (x,y,z) which sits on the boundary of Cleveland, Ohio. Really, it is a fascinating, and a beautiful place. To-morrow, they are scheduled a bat night. Some years ago in Poland and France there originated this ecological conservancy programme concerning these flying mice. It has spread elsewhere. This is not some creep show. This is serious education about stewardship of nature.

A lot of graveyards go to ruin quickly. Some are so rule bound they follow factory conformity. So there may not be that many interesting ones.
I took this foto of some gravestones in front of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Trappist, Kentucky in the late morning of August 1st, 2011. There were some 90° days, followed by nightly rains, followed by morning mists and fog. Nine in the morning, visibility was near zero, within an hour it had mostly burned away. In this little patch, not pictured, there is a large stone with a listing [on both sides] of unmarked graves. The first thirteen, look to be, irish nuns. A few names later is Zachariah Riney, Lincoln's first teacher.

The critter that seemed to be fond of the stones was the mockingbird. It would make hop flights from one stone to the next. If i had a faster focusing camera, with a good telephoto lens, i could have snapped several; at least one with a tasty insect in his beak.

Trappist, Kentucky sits in Nelson County, the county seat is Bardstown. Only Baltimore was older than Bardstown as an english speaking diocese in the Americas. It just never grew. They moved the seat to Louisville, and the cathedral became a basilica. Kentucky has 120 counties. Nelson, Marion, and Washington sit together as ‘Kentucky’s Holy Land’, they together are less than 75,000 people; but the only catholic majority counties in a state absolutely full of baptists.