Author's Note: I wrote this for my Creative Writing class last year. It's basically my childhood.

So, I hope you enjoy it, and it'd be cool if you left a review!

A Child in the Graveyard

Often times when you ask a child his or her favorite place it will be somewhere like the park, or the playground, school, or the beach. When I was little, my favorite place to be was in a graveyard. My mom says that I get it from my Uncle Troy. When he was little, he often wanted to go to the graveyard and look at the tombstones. Just look. Nothing else. I enjoy this same pastime, though; there are a few things that contributed to my fondness for graveyards.

My Grandpa, my dad’s dad, was a grave digger. He still is sometimes. My dad used to go out and help grandpa dig graves when I was little, and because I had no place else to go, he would take me with him. I spent my time running around the graveyard, jumping in half dug holes and hiding behind the tombstones. I liked to listen to my grandpa and my dad talk and to the shoveling noises. The scraping of metal against dirt, and the soft noise dirt made when it hit the pile next to the ever growing hole. I was oblivious to the fact that the ground underneath me was full of dead bodies. I remember asking dad once, “What’s in there?” I pointed to a bid wooden coffin sitting next to the grave. “Uhh… treasure.” he said. He couldn’t bring himself to tell his little four year old girl what was really inside the big box.

When I was little older, and dad stopped taking me to the graveyard where Grandpa dug graves, my Papa took me to a place called the Living Farm. It was a historical farm in North Carolina, in a town near where my Nana and Papa live. He thought it would be and interesting place to take me. The Farm itself was a pathetic looking site. An old farm house, looking about ready to collapse in a cool summer breeze, a shed where a blacksmith was working, and a barn with a couple sheep, an old mule and a few goats sat, panting in the hot weather. I had an interest in the place. It fascinated me, especially the blacksmith. I sat and watched him for about an hour, listening to the sizzle of the water as he plunged the glowing hot metal into it, and the hammering of metal against metal. He even gave me something he had made. I later learned the hunk of metal he gave me was to hang plants on. But the thing that really peaked my interest was the tiny family graveyard. Papa walked me over to the forested area where the graves resided. They were off an old, beaten down trail of weeds and little sapling trees. I was old enough by now to know what was buried under the soil here. There were several different families that had lived in the farm house since its conception. There were two stones marking each grave, a headstone and a footstone. The sizes varied from grave to grave, signifying that not only adults had died on this farm. I wanted to stay for a little longer, and examine the grubby, fading stones, but Papa said it was time to leave.

In 8th grade, I went to a family reunion in Canada with my Papa, my Aunt Felicia and my Uncle Troy. We weren’t just going to socialize with a whole bunch of old, wrinkly people that I had never met, heard of, or even knew we were related to, we were going to look at the graves of our ancestors. Papa has recently become interested in the Hughes family history, and decided take us up there to say hello to our distant relatives and have an excuse to check out some gravesites. The clouds were out, covering the sun’s golden rays, adding a kind of gloom to the scene before us. These graveyards were beautiful, in that creepy horror movie kind of way. They were ancient stones, the carved letters barely readable on some of them, worn away from many years of the cold, relentless wind. Head stones cracked and broken, some shifting, and sinking into the ground. It was a classic horror movie set. Even the weather had decided to greet us with a gloomy welcome. I can recall the beautifully carved stone, and recall the broken headstone with the cracked piece laying, forgotten on the ground next to it, to big and heavy for it to get stolen, but I don’t remember any of the names of my Canadian ancestors.

About a year and a half ago my mother took me to an old church down in North Carolina, near where my grandparents live. It was a Moravian church called Bethabra. The church was closed that day, and the weather was not at all very nice. It was threatening to rain and it was very windy. I sat drawing the church, sitting on an old stone well, my hands freezing and going numb. My mom said there was a graveyard up the hill and through the woods. God’s Acre Graveyard. The graveyard gates were beautiful, they sent a pleasurable chill up my spine, other people might have found them disturbing and foreboding, but I thought they were magnificent. ‘God’s Acre’ was spelt in wiry letters of metal, arching over the ancient gates, which stood open, welcoming anyone who desired to visit the dead. We slowly walked around the gravesite, noting dates of births and deaths. Listening to the silence, enveloping us in a blanket, muffling out the sounds of the world. It was as if the earth knew this was a place to grieve. All the people buried in this graveyard had been Moravians, and people were still being buried in it to this very day. One stone that we passed by caught my interest, it had no name. Just the word UNNAMED carved onto it, and only one date. It was a baby, died the same day it had been born. For a fleeting moment, I wondered who the mother had been, and why she hadn’t named her child, but I let the thought wash away with the rain that had started to fall.

Sometimes I think about that nameless baby and wonder why I enjoy being in a place that’s so…depressing. People say goodbye to their family members and loved ones in graveyards, they don’t hang out in them, especially little girls. I’ve had many good memories attached to graveyards, good memories that outweigh the bad ones. And I have to smile when I think about the surprised look on people’s faces when I, an innocent and smiley young girl, say that I like being in graveyards.