The Cemetary on Pine Hill

There's both a winter of the land and a winter of the spirit. In the first the world is blanketed in snow and in the second the motions of the soul are muffled and cold. The sun at the heart of the human spirit moves in tune with the sun of the world and the two seasons often coincide. In the winter not even the strongest plough can till the land. Cold brings the dirt close together. Like a forge the winter hammers the earth to steel. It's a slow season for the cemetary. No seeds are planted and nothing comes to fruit. The wind cuts across the hills like the ringing of a cold bell and the pine trees rub their branches together like old women eagerly rubbing their hands before a fire. These are the high holy days of the dead and they cast a pall on the happiness of man.

But atleast two hundred years have to pass before a graveyard comes into the fullness of its power. The plants that take the longest to bloom are the ones that grow in the harshest of climates. The best graveyards grow chaotically and sit like a labyrinth among the living. There should be as many trees as possible because the full light of the sun has a sanitizing effect on the human imagination. And avoid graveyards built on flat land. There's a tendency to lay the stones out in neat orderly rows like a library of the dead. What a cemetary needs most is a wild air. But the rarest ingrediant to a powerful graveyard, a graveyard that can lay its hands on a man's heart and tap its own beat, is a series of graves curiously designed and with a story to tell.

The cemetary on pine hill had all these things but what I remember most was the final resting place of Horatio Alger. When a man has a sinister reputation his family often atones for his sin by building a public work. In the case of Horatio Alger his family built a tiny one room mausoleum from gray granite. The ground is too hard to dig in the winter so the cemetary was in dire need of a small building where the corpses could be interred until the spring. When Horatio died in the summer of 1805 the Alger family was all too happy to provide the help. There was a simple stain glass window on the north side and shelves for the dead all about. The floor was carved with Horatio's birth date and epitaph. His last remains lay underneath. What intrigued me as a young boy was the regularity with which bodies laid in the mausoleum during the hard winter disappeared come spring.