A walk thru the family graveyard:<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s a story I would rather not tell, but feel I must.\u00a0 The love and laughter of days gone by had a counterpoint in grief.\u00a0 It would be easy to view our past thru rose colored glasses, but that would be just a fairy tale; nothing more.\u00a0 There is no joy in life without tragedy and our ancestors saw both in spades.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 Once each year on Decoration Day (now called Memorial Day) my Father would collect all of his sons, and as many relatives as he could, to clean the Riter family graveyard.\u00a0 We climbed the hill to \u201cOld Moldy\u201d with an assortment of hand tools, axes and brush hooks.\u00a0 As the day progressed, grass, weeds and briars were cut.\u00a0 Fences were then repaired and gravestones reset as necessary, leaving the cemetery to look modestly presentable for another year.\u00a0 As the smallest of the boys during these years, I was of little use for real labor and spent a large part of the day reading the grave markers and asking anyone who would talk to me a thousand questions about each.\u00a0 I wondered what the people were like when still living and where they were now.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 I noticed, with particular interest,\u00a0 that two of the adjoining stones were for children having died only one day apart.\u00a0 A girl, Ellie, and a boy, Spencer, were four and six years old respectively.\u00a0 The stones were of limestone, which preserves engraving less well than granite.\u00a0 From what I could read, they were s\/o and d\/o my Grandpa and Grandma Riter.\u00a0 When queried about it, my Father explained that he wasn\u2019t born yet when all of this happened.\u00a0 He was visibly uncomfortable just talking about it.\u00a0 \u201cChildhood diseases,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cLook around you.\u00a0 A lot of children didn\u2019t live to grow up in those days.\u201d\u00a0 He made it bluntly clear to me that we were much too busy to talk any more about it.\u00a0 I knew better than to broach the subject again.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 For some reason, it stayed in my memory well into adulthood.\u00a0 Tragedy struck my wife and myself years later when our own infant son suddenly died during the night.\u00a0 God help anyone who knows such loss, for nothing less than the experience itself can teach the pain involved.\u00a0 I believe it was our sense of duty to our living children that held us together as a family, and for a time, I wondered if my own sanity could be salvaged, or if I even wanted it to be.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 During these hard times, I revisited thoughts of Ellie and Spencer at rest these many years in the Riter cemetery.\u00a0 I once wondered out loud in front of my Mother how my grandparents could have lived with that much grief.\u00a0 She poured us each a cup of coffee and sat down at the table.\u00a0 \u201cI know the children you speak of quite well through your grandmother Mason,\u201d she said.\u00a0 \u201cShe often spoke of them and actually believed that she, at least, had survived the ordeal.\u00a0 Of course, neither she nor your grandfather really did.\u201d \u00a0With that she began to tell me a story that I was now able to understand.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 She told me about a boy named Spencer who was the apple of his Father\u2019s eye.\u00a0 Although too young to accomplish much around the farm, he followed grandpa everywhere he went.\u00a0 He carried tools for him, discussed the crops, livestock, and rain, or lack thereof, as if he were old enough to understand all these things that he knew grown up farmers worried about.\u00a0 He was grandpa\u2019s constantly, wide eyed companion from sunup to sundown.\u00a0 Ellie was grandma\u2019s girl.\u00a0 She carried her own supply of homemade sunshine and happiness.\u00a0 Becoming cross with her took extreme effort.\u00a0 Staying that way was impossible.\u00a0 There was never a room so dark nor a spirit so depressed that she could not lift to a higher level.\u00a0 Such were Spencer and Ellie to their parents and all who knew them.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 Early, one summer afternoon, while grandpa and Spence were repairing fences in the Cumbridge Meadow, little Spencer suddenly sat down.\u00a0 He was white as a sheet and when granddad felt his forehead, he later said that he could have fried an egg on it.\u00a0 \u201cYou need to go back to the house now and tell your Mother to make a mustard plaster for you.\u201d\u00a0 Spence rose and walked slowly to the house, arriving in time to find that his little sister was also ill and being tucked into bed by their frantic Mother.\u00a0 She immediately order the eldest son to hitch up a horse to her butty and go bring the doctor from Wileyville.\u00a0 It was an eight mile ride and would take time, but without help, she knew neither of the children would make it.\u00a0 When the doctor arrived, he was greeted by a sight that he had seen more than enough of lately.\u00a0 It was Scarlet Fever, a disease from the blackest pits of Hell.\u00a0 There were no effective drugs available.\u00a0 Old midwife\u2019s root and herbal concoctions (even the ones learned from Indians) had long since proven themselves useless against this killer.\u00a0 Folks said death visited an average of two children from each family around the county that summer.\u00a0 Over the years, my own visits to the graveyards of Wetzel County have pretty much borne that out.\u00a0 More than a few doctors even stopped making house calls that year, and were rumored to have spent the remainder of the season in their own wine cellars.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 That Friday night Spencer succumbed, and come Saturday morning, it was Ellie\u2019s turn.\u00a0 As was the custom, funeral arrangements were made quickly.\u00a0 Men of the neighborhood built pine boxes, dug graves, and found large fieldstones to use until proper tombstones could be obtained.\u00a0 Draft horses and a wooden sled carried the coffins up the hill to the graveyard.\u00a0 An elderly minister tearfully conducted one service at the house and another at the graveside.\u00a0 This part of his business was, by now, becoming unbearable.\u00a0 After the service, grandpa and grandma walked home together without speaking.\u00a0 She sat quietly on the porch swing and stared into empty space.\u00a0 He paced the floor for a minute and then left for the field where he and Spence had been working.\u00a0 As she sat, she noticed bare footprints in the soft soil of the yard.\u00a0 They were Ellie\u2019s.\u00a0 She had so loved playing outside without her shoes.\u00a0 In weather as good as this summer\u2019s, it was not discouraged.\u00a0 It occurred to grandma that this was all she had left of a beautiful child.\u00a0 Suddenly grandpa reappeared.\u00a0 He was holding Spencer\u2019s coat which had still been hanging on the fence where they last worked together.\u00a0 He stood there shaking and holding the coat in his outstretched hand as if offering it to some invisible entity.\u00a0 Still neither of them could speak.\u00a0 kHe laid the coat down on the empty end of the swing and walked straight to the cellar.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cHe\u2019s going to get drunk,\u201d she thought.\u00a0 She was right.\u00a0 It was said that grandpa was never sober again, not on purpose anyway.\u00a0 As she sat there, it started to rain.\u00a0 To her horror, she saw Ellie\u2019s footprints beginning to melt.\u00a0 \u201cYou have her spirit, God!\u201d\u00a0 She cried, \u201cat least leave me her memory!\u201d\u00a0 She even began to throw her clothing over what remained of in a futile effort to save those precious prints.\u00a0 It was all to no avail.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 Grandpa didn\u2019t change much for the rest of his life, sobering up only as much as duty required, or when the kids were able to hide the whiskey and cider.\u00a0 This was also the day grandma began going mad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A walk thru the family graveyard: \u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s a story I would rather not tell, but feel I must.\u00a0 The love and laughter of days gone by had a counterpoint in grief.\u00a0 It would be easy to view our past thru rose colored glasses, but that would be just a fairy tale; nothing more.\u00a0 There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}