The Indian Cemetery

Located on the left side of a Catholic Church in Oceana County, Michigan is an Indian cemetery that goes back many, many years. The right side of the church has a traditional "white people" cemetery.

Plain wooden crosses mark the vast majority of the graves, others use rocks. Only a handful have traditional headstones. I am not sure why no effort was made to identify who is in the graves. I could not see any carved or written names on the crosses or stones. Did the person(s) performing the burials even know who they were? Was it against their faith to put the persons name on the grave? If you know why, I would appreciate an email.

A very interesting monument

My first thought was: holy cow, that must have cost a ton of money. Followed by: boy, their family sure loved them. Then I studied it and began to wonder about the look on the man's face. Just what is he thinking about? His sentiment at that time must have been very relevant to the person(s) who designed this grand monument. So much so they wanted to share it with anyone who might come across, as I did.
I showed it to my husband and, almost immediately, he said: "she must have been a nag.” Funny, but I am sure that they would not use a monument of this scope to communicate such a message.

It's been awhile

since my last post.

My life is busy, sometimes too busy. As time goes by the more I seem to take on, trying to experience everything while I still can. There is a song I listen to from time to time - “When the Crowds are Gone” by Savatage, that contains the line “I wasted my time till time wasted me”. I don’t ever want to think that I wasted the time I was given.

In July, besides all the gardening and my normal daily job, I spent three days at the Rothbury Festival, volunteering for the “Green Team”. Which is a glorified name for manning a recycling/compost/garbage station. It was a fantastic time even if I did have to work part of it. There were 40,000 attendees, primarily in their early 20’s and every one I meet/talked to was nicer than the one before. It gave me so much hope for our future generations. And I was starting to really worry about it given some of the people I have to deal with in my day-to-day endeavors. Here is a link to my Rothbury blog, which shows some of the pictures I took.

I also spent time at the Muskegon Bike Time weekend. I am not a Harley girl, but I love to people watch and, boy oh boy, can you get a lot of people watching in at a motorcycle gathering. I volunteered for this event too, but only for 4 hours. Unless you count the 20 or so hours before the event that I spent making my first ever movie showing how Harley Davidson fork springs are made.

Quite a year so far, my first web site, my first blog and my first edited movie. Hmmm, what’s next?

To keep with this blogs theme, I came across this monument. I just don’t know what to say about it other than I sure like people with a sense of humor. What do you think? Is she there?

Time flies

whether you’re having fun or not.

It is the past the middle of June already!! I don’t even have all of my garden planted yet and I am starting panic. Outside weeding today, I actually wished I had the nose of Samantha Stevens. You know, the witch on the old Bewitched sitcom. I so badly wanted to just twitch my nose and have everything weeded and planted. Or be rich and pay someone else to do it. I can’t remember a year when I have been so far behind.

On a very different note, here are a couple of pictures of graves that I found interesting.



Boy, you must really, really, really, really, really love Elvis to want him on your headstone. Or maybe you didn’t. Maybe your family just thought you might want him there.







Notice the arrowhead lying on the headstone. What’s really interesting about this one is that two weeks later I walked by and it was still there! Amazing considering that one year someone stole the flowers right out of the ground from my mom’s grave at this cemetery.

So, I had sixteen graves

to take care of this year for Memorial Day. Because of cold weather, I had to wait until the Friday before I could start to deliver/plant flowers.

On Tuesday I was back at the cemeteries covering the flowers I planted and removing the ones I had set out in pots because of frost and freeze warnings. After work on Wednesday, I redelivered and uncovered. I went home, watched the news and was informed that they had miscalculated (imagine that) and the temps would dip below freezing again that night. Geez, I checked at noon and they said a low of 40. Back to the cemeteries I went. Thanks to the gas prices, I lost pretty much all my profits for the year. Grrrrrr. But hey, the flowers survived, the graves look great and that’s the important thing, right?

A little off topic but in my front yard is an enormous Mulberry tree that my grandmother planted. I can remember her telling me to never, ever plant anything in the spring until the leaves sprout on that tree. She said that Mulberry trees know when the last frost of the year is going to be so if you see leaves on them you can safely plant even if the calendar says it's too early. Guess what? So far, that tree has never been wrong. I checked it yesterday and could not find a single tiny green leaf. I planned to plant my garden this weekend but if I don’t see any leaves by then I will definitely wait.

Success!

Over the memorial weekend, in between cemetery visits, I found 21 huge
mushrooms. I cooked and ate them all in one sitting. What a wonderful meal that was – the mushrooms along with grilled, fresh picked asparagus, grilled shrimp, and beer. A feast for a king I tell you.

This mushroom season sucked

for me, at least. I hiked miles and miles and found less than 50 this year. Oh well, at least I got my exercise. I’m probably wasting my time but I still plan to look one more week before giving up for good.

I saw more deer than I did mushrooms. This was the only one who would pose for me.




I also stumbled upon this bad boy. It's a snapping turtle, with a shell about a foot in diameter, for those who don't know their turtles. He was trying to hide from me in a rainwater filled tractor rut.



And the best part of the week? I saw a bobcat. Twice. It was probably the same cat but on two different days. He walked right in front of the cabin in broad daylight. Of course, my camera was not ready either time. I am going to try putting bait out to see if I can get a picture of him.

Back to the hunt.