It was a clear October day.  The kind that only comes once an autumn in Kentucky.  The trees were clothed in their brightest.  The sun and wind worked miracles of light and shadow across the treetops on the far bank of the creek.  It was a day made for poets and lovers and dreamers.  And here in the 21^st century, a day made for television producers.

That is why I was here in the silence of the Kentucky woods in autumn.  I wanted to record with the technology of my time what was so good and wonderful and worth preserving.  But in spite of my best efforts, or perhaps because of them, the day was not to bring about the kind of remembrance that I hoped for.  It was to become a memorial to something else entirely, something over which I had no control.

After shooting videotape for what seemed like hours, fly-fishing in the icy waters without a caught fish to my name, I wandered away from the camera crew for a little relaxation.  I followed a once graveled road that led deeper into the hollow of hills formed by the creek.  The water ran past the side of the road and I never remember that day that it is not underscored by the music of the water.  It was a perfect sort of day, the sun’s rays cooled by the wind, little white clouds carded by the treetops.  I couldn’t have orchestrated it better myself.

Around a bend in the road, I came upon a little graveyard.  Most of the headstones by the front gate were relatively recent and bore the inscriptions to which we have all become accustomed.  The birth years ranged from the late 1890’s to the recent past.  The stones told the stories one would expect them to tell:  of old people finally being called home, of middle aged people dying of the world’s diseases and of little babies taken away from a mother’s aching arms.

The graveyard was triangular in shape. The widest part of the triangle was at the gate.  The creek formed the far boundary of the little cemetery and along the road was the other fencerow that enclosed the plot.  At the apex of the triangle stood a lone pine tree, grown large over the years.  There were no competitors around it vying for sunlight and water.  Its roots made the ground surrounding it rough and lumpy and the tree loomed large over the little weatherworn stones at its base.  It came to me, irreverently, that there was no dearth of fertilizer in a cemetery.

I wandered aimlessly from stone to stone, reading the names and calculating length of lifetimes.  It was a strangely personal experience.  This woman had been just my age, this boy the same age as my son, this man just a little older than me, or that one, just a little younger.  It came to me in that place that the lesson all graveyards have to teach us and why we so energetically avoid learning that lesson.  Life is short:  no matter how much time you have it is never enough.  Today, tomorrow or fifty years from now; the little bit of living we do, no matter how painful, is never enough.

The ground was soft beneath my feet.  Not muddy soft but unstable.  The subterranean layer was crisscrossed with thousands of more tunnels.  Every step sank into the soft grass.  It was hard not to imagine that it was not the first slide into the inner reaches of the netherworld.  Falling, falling without warning or without anything to hold on to that would keep you from tumbling into a grave ready-made for you.  But you, leaving this gorgeous, colorful, sunlit world, for you it is a grave for which you are not ready, for which you will never be ready.  Then the questions began to come to me:  Are we all drawn unwillingly into that hole?  Or is it the merciful release for which we all hope at the end of a long, long span of days?

I reached the small headstones at the base of the big pine tree.  They were really nothing more than fieldstones propped up to mark the burying hole of some long-dead pilgrim or pioneer.  They bore no mark, no names.  They were eroded from the rain and wind and weather but they had no identifying inscriptions.  The rough rocks stood as mute sentinels.

I don’t know what made me stop and drop to my knees to look closely at one small stone at the edge of the plot.  Perhaps it was a trick of the light, sunlight glancing off the back of a scudding cloud and bending down to illuminate the face of the stone.  I ran my fingers over the rock to make sure that what I was seeing was real.  My touch gave proof to the fact that there was something etched on the rock.  Just two words.  I thought for a moment it was a figment of my over-active imagination, or just simple erosion that teasingly looked like words.  But no, it was a message left by an unsteady hand countless years before.  There were no dates, no Bible verses, and no name to claim the bit of Kentucky earth.  Just two words: rember me.

The writing was fine and spidery.  The words had been graven into the limestone with a sharp object, maybe a roofing nail or another rock.  But there they were plain as day.

Rember me.  Remember me. Remember who?  Man? Woman? Child?  I do remember you.  I want to.  I want to pay homage to you in this quiet, bright glade.  Do you know I am standing here, trying to imagine who you are, what you felt?  I feel your need for immortality.  I feel it, too.  In remembering you, I make a deposit against the day that some unknown person, generations hence, stops at my little stone and remembers me.

The images rose in my mind of a young man, pale and consumptive, longing for a bit more living.  Or a young mother, giving her children one final command, asking one final thing.  Rember me who birthed you and nursed you and taught you to laugh.  I am gone now but I live still in the gifts I gave you.  Rember them. Rember me.

Coming down the road towards me, I heard the shouts of the crew, coming to call me back to reality.  There was a job to be done, memories to capture on videotape so thousands of people could see these Kentucky woods on this fall day and in some way, remember.  To remember that nature reminds us who we are and as the leaves burn brightly before they fall, so does the human spirit burn brightly at the last.  The lessons and questions of the graveyard stay with through all the days of our natural lives.  We can never fully answer the questions but they teach and remind.

Kelli Summers Sorg 2003