A Walk in the Woods

It's natural to explore.

I live in a nice neighborhood, a nice house, with a nice yard.
To the left of my backyard, the lake, to the right, seemingly endless woods.

When I was a kid I spent endless hours exploring and pillaging those woods. I was a hopeless tom boy.

After my run tonight, I walked to the back yard to cool down, and looked into those woods where so many memories were made. I hadn't been in them for years.

So I started walking.

It was a little different but mostly the same. My old tree house is rotting, but it was glorious in its prime. I stepped on a nail back there, and had even built a bridge across a ditch once. Once I stumbled upon a group of teenagers smoking pot deep in the woods. I've never seen pot heads run that fast. And with damaged lungs too! Impressive.

I was walking down the newly made four-wheel trails, when I came upon a grave yard. I had discovered the grave yard when I was about nine, walking through the woods one day alone. I was completely freaked out that there were dead people buried in my back yard, ran back home, and then apparently blocked it out of my mind because I had forgotten about it.

As I walked towards it, a deer jumped out and scared me to death. I felt like the female lead in some zombie movie as I opened the rusty gate, and stepped inside the tiny cemetery.

It was a family cemetery, with the name Mcartha etched across every worn headstone. Most of them had died in the late 1700s-early 1800s, as young as 20 and as old as 94.

Across every stone, the phrase "Gone but not Forgotten" was carved.

There were a few roses scattered around. A tree had fallen across the gate.

I wondered if there were any surviving Mcarthas, and if they knew that their relatives were buried out here in the middle of nowhere, where boys drove four wheelers and teenagers smoked pot.

I walked slowly home, pondering life and death, and listened to the birds sing.