After my annual visit, I am pleased to announce that Mom and Dad are still there. If there was an…read morezombie apocalypse in Langlade County, they weren't part of it.
Warning: A mix of review and personal mémoire follows.
I've been coming here for as long as I can remember to tend to the graves of my great grandparents and my grandfather who passed away before my mother was born. Some of my outstanding memories of the place include trees. Lots of trees. A huge stand of jackpines stood like soldiers across the back of the cemetery, looking much like a CCC project. In those thirty years from the Great Depression, they had grown to make a nice backdrop to the serenity of the rural cemetery. (Not so rural anymore, either.)
Several families had planted Arbor Vitae adjacent to the headstones of their loved ones. Arbor Vitae tend to grow slowly, so during the years of my youth, their growth was almost imperceptible. After Grandma died in 1971, my uncle took care of the gravesites so I didn't go back to Elmwood , except to inter my dad in the mid-1970s and Mom in 1991.
Holy mackerel, did those Arbor Vitae grow over those years! You can see a photo I posted a few years ago that looked like they were taking over.
No longer. They've all been cut down.
Half of that crop of jackpines was harvested about 25 years ago and it just looks awful back there. About half of the crop still stands, but to me, the south edge of the cemetery still looks bruised and scarred.
With all the Arbor Vitae gone, well, the whole place seems kinda empty to me. Still, it's a nice, serene place to spend eternity. (I can't. The entire family plot has been filled. Great-grandpa didn't plan on the 21st Century.)
The big iron gates that blocked the entrance overnight, long rusted out and replaced by a chain with a padlock. The trees are gone. But Mom, Dad, Aunt, Uncle, Grandma, Grandpa, Great-Grandma and Great Grandpa are still there.
