Monday, October 26, 2009

And speaking of Townie Tuesday

I took the advice of Ghlee Woodworth and drove through Oak Hill Cemetery over the weekend.

Hard to believe I had the time, with all the conversing I did this weekend, but I did it.

What will you think of me when I say I'd never been in there before?

Next time, I'll actually get out of the car and walk around. Ghlee has an interesting bit in her book Tiptoe Through the Tombstones about people's fascination in the 19th century with graveyards and making them into elaborate places where people went to picnic and otherwise socialize.

I belatedly say that I highly recommend the book. Not only is the content interesting, but it is visually very appealing, which I really like in anything that I am reading, or even places that I am living.

That's mostly what I didn't like about living in southern Michigan.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hereby confess to 'otherwise socializing' in a variety of burial grounds with a variety of young lasses and/or a variety of chemical substances, up to and including that vile weed, on a number of occasions during my days attending Miskatonic University.

I was not accosted by the nameless horrors I felt lurking in the shadowed tombs, nor was I molested by He Who Shall Not Be Named, and neither did any of the rumored reanimated corpses shuffled towards our impromptu lovers' nest.

We did suffer some intrigue, on one occasion, by a constable of the law, who was highly amused at the uses and abuses which we had found for a New England table grave. On another occasion we had procured a bag of nutritious items with which to fend off our smoke-inspired hunger, only to have said bag invaded by ants who were, in all probability, sent by one of the Ancient Ones to foul our twinkies.

- HP LoveCarrot

Gillian Swart said...

Thanks, Carrot ... I have to confess that in my college days there was a cemetery down the street from my dorm and we used to go there, also to "otherwise socialize" - until the night I didn't notice I was walking over a newly-covered grave and sank into it up to my ankles. EEK

It was covered with fallen leaves.

I shrieked, my boyfriend hauled me out of the mire, and I never returned.

Sarah Swart said...

http://theurbanophile.blogspot.com/2009/08/detroit-urban-laboratory-and-new.html
from the Daily Dish
(in order to romanticize southern Michigan)