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The Lost Graveyard

    It's easy to romanticize the mountains of the southern United States. If you move from somewhere else, as so many people do, you see the beauty, charm, animals, the forests and the streams. It seems an easy-going lifestyle.
    As a southerner born, you've grown up hearing stories about less pleasant times. Perhaps, if you're older, you could tell a few stories yourself.
    The other day I found an old graveyard near the back of my property. It was deserted, overgrown, perhaps only a handful of people being aware of its existence. I have walked within a stone's throw of it hundreds of times and didn't know it was there. It's hard to say how many are buried there, perhaps fifteen? Most of the graves have no true marker, only a piece of mountain stone with no name or date, nor any mark upon it. Mountain stones just like them are hauled out of these mountains by the truckload to decorate the front of a store in Indiana or a nice home in Georgia.
    There are three markers with words. One lady, who was born around 1790. Yes, you're right, about 70 years before the Civil War. Her husband used a chisel to chip out the words and numbers for his 'beloved wife'. You can see where his arm got tired and the chisel skidded over the last few strokes.
    An early preacher, perhaps the same man, has a waist-high pile of stones over his bones. They are the oddest looking stones, looking very much like gray loaves of bread, hand hewn and stacked like a pyramid with a flat top. A single one is missing on one side, doubtless allowing a small animal an entrance for shelter or a more macabre purpose.
    I stood there a while, hands folded, a sober mood upon me. I started to remember stories about the old days, the hard life of the mountain folks, country folk. Yeah, you might call them hillbillies. Very few of them could read or write.They went their whole life and never saw a doctor, many never saw a town. There was an old man who drove a horse and wagon and sold goods out of the back of it, more often bartering. You might tell him you wanted some cloth and he'd bring it around a month later, in exchange for a chicken or a gallon of blackberries.
    They rendered their own soap, had no meat unless they killed it. A friend of mine told me about the coal camps he grew up in. His family lived in a tin shack that was thrown up in the area where coal was being dug at the time. They traveled from mine to mine, a bunch of families. No toilet, no running water. By the time they were 20 they looked 50, their teeth rotting from their heads. I remember a dentist fussing about flossing. My friend told him that he'd never heard of flossing until he was older than the dentist was.
    Yes, I stood in the woods that day and looked at the graves as these memories and dozens of others flowed around me like sands of time. Then I thought of the way I embellish the "Author's Green Retreat" and romanticize this harsh land. Then I walked quietly through the cold forest to my home, my wife by my side.
    CE Wills.

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