A Short Walk in the Cemetery

It may sound odd to American ears, but my favorite place in Leicester to go take a walk is the Welford Road Cemetery. It lies directly across the street from campus, and my train runs by its opposite side.

In Texas, cemeteries are great open swathes of land, baking in the sun, with gravestones spread out in geometric rows on bald, blanched grass. They have main gates and wire fences, and no one ever goes there unless they have sad business. This seems to me a terrible way to inter the dead and to display the humanity of their past and the reality of their faith.

In the UK, cemeteries are old and half-overgrown, tumble-down gardens of green, with trees and vines and grand, black-shaded angels of stone peeping out from under weathered wings. A casual observer can wander in them at will, reading names and dates, imagining the vast history and impact of each human life, wondering endlessly how many souls around you are singing in heaven (or not, I suppose. But that is sad). In cemeteries, you can meet people named Hephzibah...which is a feat not to be accomplished anywhere else in the modern world (albeit, perhaps for good reason). You also meet a good many Charleses, Elizabeths, Jameses, Annes, and so forth. 

When I stopped on the way back from ballet last Saturday, there were snow drops growing all over the graveyard, looking so springy.

It was also very sunny and lovely in general - my first real taste of not-winter!!

Below, looking from the graveyard toward the tower in which I have all of my classes:

Some of the stones and monuments speak Christ's hope back to the living:

This one above reads, at the bottom, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," and I always hear it sung to me the way Handel set it.

Overtime, I have developed some favorite graves. There is a lady named Isaline, which is unconventional and lovely.

There is also another one which I walk past almost every time, though I refrain from posting a picture because it belongs to a modern and still-living family, not to the 1800's. It is a family grave, and just in the middle of the names is a little girl named Emma, who died at only 5 years old. Her grandmother's name follows after her own, which twists my heart every time. It sounds so sad, but the family has filled in the area in front of the headstone with bright silk flowers and toys. There are figurines and fairies, puppets and bunnies and kitties, pinwheels and peonies and pansies, and it looks like a child's fairy garden, only briefly paused in play, and soon to be resumed. Emma, were she alive, would be 26 today, but in an odd way, her beautiful kindergartener's playground in the peaceful green of Welford Road is almost completely happy.

And, lastly, I share two pictures of my all-time favorite grave in the cemetery. I rather look forward to meeting the members of this family one day, in the glorified bodies in which we both believe!

Read closer, now:

So sure, I spend time in a cemetery. But, I always leave singing Easter joy.

I'm Sick of Not Posting Things,

So, I'm posting something.

For all I was a 4.0 undergrad, I can be an extremely slow study in other areas of life.

My dad has been suggesting for years that perhaps I would post more on my blog if I didn't pressure myself to make every post into a massive essay with some deeply insightful revelation. But, being an overachiever with a heavy dose of mule blood, I so far haven't listened.

But, I'm trying new things at this stage of my life, so why not?

It has struck me this week in Leicester that my life here is BEAUTIFUL and it's really kind of cruel of me not to share it with so many of you who would love it. I have been brought to this epiphany primarily by the weather, which has suddenly warmed to an entire 59 degrees today, and to above 40 for most of this week's highs. As a frank warm-weather creature, I have suddenly crawled out of my annual blanketed lair of February misery and realized that I'm in England and my life is awesome!

Here are some things I've really enjoyed lately:
 - walks in the Welford Road Cemetery (picture post coming soon!)
 - my two dance classes, and the girls in them!
 - have spent some more time hanging out with people from my department lately
 - the Paternoster lift in the Attenborough tower was out for two weeks but is working again...I may need a blog post on that, too, because that thing is one-of-a-kind.
 - I've had some excellent reading for classes, lately. And I've even finished most of it on time!
 - one of my dear flatmates lent me her grocery bag-on-wheels (Br.: trolley) to use any time, and I have been able to bring home so much more food with so much less pain to my injured shoulders and cranky spine.

I even pushed my sleeves up above my elbows while taking said grocery cart to and from Morrisons (the "supermarket") today!

Also, I still just really like the train that goes by my window at all hours of the day and night. I love living next to a train...or, really, to a railroad track with many trains. Sure, I have to backtrack the sound at least three times in any movie I watch, but there's something comforting and fascinating about the sound of a train. They're so regular in their mechanical repetitions and their stop-watch time tables, but they're also so free in their intense motion - as they rush past you in a whirl of power and dust, they seem unhasped, as if they could go anywhere. When you see or hear one go past, it could be going to Birmingham or Glasgow, London or Cardiff, or off to the end of the world for all I know. Trains are adventuresome, yet disciplined.Trains are so ordinary, and yet so fantastical.

I wish I could take the train home with me when I go. But since I can't, I'll share it with you.