Yesterday, I made the drive to my grandmother’s house to get another haul of photos, as though I’m even a little bit finished processing the first batch.   I just had so much terror that the efforts to clean and flip the house quickly would result in some precious photos being lost and I was twitchy as hell about leaving them there for any length of time.  

So I made the drive.  It was weird.  I haven’t driven to that town myself, from where I live now, ever, I don’t think.  

I got into the house and found all the photos lined up by the door where my uncle said they would be, and I went and ransacked my grandmother’s desk, because she told me to, haha.  I found that amazing leather book of 100 year old treasures in a small box that originally held some kind of holiday deer or sheep sculpture and the box was so heavy I thought it was still in there.  I’m so glad I looked, because also inside were the tiny pair of glasses that I suspect belonged to my great-great grandfather.  Grandmother used to have them out on display and she talked fondly of them when I last visited her.  I tried them on just to be a dork (I did this also with my Grandfather’s enormous pilot hat) and was startled that I could see through them.  

I collected those and the literal duffel bags full of photos into my car, and headed out.  I drove down my grandparents’ road and made a left.  

And then realized that, for some reason, I was just following the route my mother had always taken to take us to her house for the weekend when I was growing up and that was North.  I needed to go emphatically South.  

I popped my home address into my GPS and it kept me on the road for a little longer, telling me take a right on Frew Road.  Frew was the last name of my Great x5 Grandmother.  I thought that was a nice little thing and came up upon the road to turn and the road bordered a cemetery.  I saw two of those big stones that just host a single family name so all the smaller first name stones can be scattered around.  

HAZEN

HOUK

Neither of which are my name, but are HUGE in my family research adventures.  I know those people!  Part of me IS those people!  I was startled and pulled into the parking lot of the church across the street.  I turned off the GPS and sat in my car with mounds of pictures I could barely fit in my back seat and rain just absolutely hammering on my car.  I looked at the stones and the names and my shoes and the time.  I had an umbrella.  

I ran across the road and took the stairs to the cemetery in the rain and immediately found the ocean of Houks.  I felt like I was walking on eggshells.  Every crunchy twig or weirdly tilled piece of Earth made me feel like I was crunching bones, like I was hurting or disrespecting or intruding.  Many of the headstones there were replacements - the originals worn to be barely legible, if at all.  

But I got emotional running into everyone, like they were people I hadn’t seen in a few years, or like I could have hugged the stones and told them it was nice to see them, I’d heard so much about them.  I have been looking for Mary’s parents for the last month, and there she was.  So were many of her husband William’s siblings.  Many of her children and their spouses were in the same square space lightly traced out in the grass.  Tina was there.  I almost cried seeing Tina.  I hadn’t lost her - she had been born 90-something years before me - but I had been on the trail to find out what happened to her so passionately and then found all the sad of her and her husband dead within three days of each other because of pneumonia that it was somehow a bit of a twinge to be there.  Their headstone was still original, unlike Mary’s and many others.  

According to records, my great-grandmother, Kaye, the keeper of all these albums that were taken by my grandmother when she died and now given on to me, is in that cemetery too, but I couldn’t find her.  I found a lot of dead children instead.  I found two fresh graves. Graves seemed oriented in multiple directions and I became concerned about standing on people.  It was harder to walk over anyone buried within the last year than someone who had been there 70 years.  I walked around when I noticed graves with thinner grass, clear outlines.

I have a lot of family members dismissive of cemeteries, I think mostly because they’re religious and don’t want to think about it or confront it too much.  Heaven and souls and forever is easier for them.  “She’s not there,” or, “I don’t need to go to that place to remember her,” or, “I know where she is, we don’t need to make a big deal about a marker,” are the kinds of things I used to hear, but I feel deep things about memorials, about attempts to remember, about tributes.  I think this is a consequence of the fourth grade attack of loving Ancient Egypt that has never left.  I like the etched words, I like the different styles of memorial through decades.  I like seeing the names, imagining the years.  I dislike knowing that the amount of memorial that can be left is often a matter of money.  I feel a little overwhelmed in a good but affecting way in these places, even if they aren’t accidentally full of relatives.    

I hadn’t planned to do this, it was an accident of autopilot, so I was dressed in a way that could have been construed poorly if someone had seen me.  The giant skull on my shirt with ‘Something Dark Lives Inside My Heart’ wrapped around it, skull leggings, and my three clashing patterns could have really attracted some attention.  I was preparing to fight with a hypothetical groundskeeper in the rain.  “You got a problem?  I’m related to everyone within 20 feet of where we’re standing and I have pictures of all of them in my car as we speak.”

I packed up to go home after I’d walked nearly every row of the place and took a different route home and didn’t have a panic attack about it, which is always preferable.  I’d literally left my hometown thinking, “Well, I’ll go to the cemetery another day,” thinking of the one up on the hill where Grandpa Ben buried that foot.  I had no idea I’d accidentally drive into the one containing the other side of my grandmother’s family.  

There’s no fancy conclusion to this, it was just a thing that happened to me that I don’t think my family will appreciate in the same way I do.  I’ll either hear about their god or be told that the trip was morbid.  It didn’t feel like either of those things, despite the church across the street and my skull outfit.  I just Felt, and the internet often understands the things I feel - or that I feel at all - better than my (living) family.