I enjoy walking through cemeteries. Names of the past seldom used anymore and symbols of fraternal organizations long gone adorn old headstones. My local cemetery, the Jefferson City Cemetery, is the kind I enjoy most: unmaintained, overgrown, seldom visited, and with a good view. There is beauty to monuments returning to earth as have those they memorialize, and in the way granite weathers in Montana when no one is left to mourn those who are gone. There’s a lot of character there.
Jefferson County has roughly a dozen cemeteries; some active, some maintained and some neither. One of our most well-known cemeteries is Elkhorn Cemetery. It is on top of a fine hill, and along with the signs of elk, has many graves of children from a diphtheria epidemic in 1889. A more powerful reminder of how easy we have it nowadays is hard to find.
I often walk it, and look out at the Elkhorns and wonder what the view was like when they first decided this was where their cemetery would be. The trees that obscure the hills around it are younger than the cemetery itself. Even the views of yesteryear expire on earth, usually without any memorials to remember them.
