post number ten,the twenty-fourth day of October

I haven't posted in a while, although I do have a lovely draft about my September research trip in my files. Since I completely missed writing about the twenty-fourth day of September, here is a bit about 24 October, in all of its mundane glory.


10:10am I left my apartment with a finished outline, and materials for the 11am class. I'm not actually taking the class, but I'm the graduate assistant for the professor. His other class is a graduate seminar, so I help with this one. It's been a fun job so far, even with grading papers. The walk to campus was beautiful, as it is most mornings.
I traipsed through the cemetery, which is the most direct path with the least amount of incline. It probably sounds unusual to go through the cemetery, but this is the oldest one in Fayetteville (1840s), so the design invokes the ideology of the antebellum period. Before the Civil War, there was a movement in America to create park-like cemeteries. Landscape architects rejected the "European" traditions: concrete slabs within cathedrals, or unmarked graves next to the parish. They were creating a separate American identity, and wanted to celebrate the natural world of Americas, where life and death were not be separated, but intertwined. Or so claimed the romantically and philosophically minded Transcendentalists. The more practical reason lies in geography; there's just more space to bury the dead in America.
Evergreen Cemetery is relatively full now, as the rest of the rocky hillside has been transformed into the University of Arkansas, but walking through it is peaceful and reassuring. Behind the wrought-iron fence, the wide paths lead through ancient trees and green space, around tall, hand-carved limestone monuments, and beside the small modern granite headstones. This time of year, the old oaks and majestic maples are embracing both life and death. Their pride and plumage- their leaves- are changing colors, and falling away, as the trees ready themselves for another cruelly fickle north Arkansas winter. I so skipped along, breathing in the fresh, cool air, and enjoying the forethought of past Fayetteville residents, some of whom were sleeping beneath the same ground.