Last Monday: A Girl, A Bike, The Cemetery

October 13, 2008 / No Comments

You'll have to forgive my frequent lack of blogging lately.  We took that wonderful trip to North Dakota, I've been scrambling to finish putting together a REALLY GREAT educational project that I am SO VERY EXCITED about and will tell you more about later this week, my mom and sister-in-law came for a visit over the past weekend, and tonight we are getting more company that we are extremely excited about. It has been a whirlwind of activity around here.

I'm going to try to catch up on a few posts about things that happened last week.

After school on Monday, my lovely first grader was nearly beside herself with boundless after-school energy, so I decided we were getting out of the house before I went clinically insane.  I forced them all out the door, but of course, they didn't want to go for a walk or a hike in the beautiful fall forest, and because it had been raining and raining, it was very mucky and muddy in our yard.  When I thought of the brilliant idea of taking a bicycle to one of the HUGE the cemeteries in our neighborhood, my first grader was a bundle of motivated energy.  

First of all, you have to understand that safe places for kids to ride a bicycle in our community are few and far between.  Second of all, you need to know that the cemeteries are maintained like fantastic parks (a lot of our parks are not traditional . . . most of them are forests).  People congregate at the cemeteries in our neighborhood (which are both bigger than many golf courses) to not only memorialize their loved ones, but to appreciate the history of the extremely unique gravesites, walk their dog, feed the ducks, and let their children run unhindered on grassy plains.  In addition, the cemeteries have miles of paved asphalt paths that are pretty much void of traffic.  The cemetery is a terrific place to do some bike riding with kids.  The kidlets don't mind the gravestones a bit.

It was a great adventure for a very rainy, dreary day.  Eventually the little ones melted down and the bigger one took a tumble on her bike and scraped her chin, but really, we enjoyed ourselves.  We especially enjoyed the well groomed trees and their beautiful fall foilage.  

Fallbikes
 

That's Mr. Sneaky Pants in the background, pretending that his bear backpack is his scuba diver airtank. He was a scuba diving superhero that day.  

Cemeterytree

Bigtree

The truth of the matter is that I think cemeteries are kind of a cozy, silly place.  I used to play in the prairie cemeteries when I was little.  (My favorite part was pumping the water from a hand pump well to water the flowers on my ancestors' gravesites).  My cousins and I used to play hide and seek in the cemetery next to their country church in Nebraska.  Cemeteries are awesome places to play hide and seek.  We also made up a game called statues.  Whenever a car drove by the cemetery we had to freeze like statues in crazy positions because we decided that made us invisible.  I spent a great deal of time in my adolescence mowing cemeteries under my grandfather's keen supervision.  Cemeteries don't really present a problem for me.  Sometimes I wonder why we use up all that space to memorialize people who might be better brought to memory by words written about them, the money spent on cemetery upkeep used instead to help orphans in Liberia or to purchase a goat for a family that needs it (I write that in all seriousness).  

But since the cemeteries are there, and it doesn't look like their going anywhere, I think I will continue to use them for child exercise purposes.  I can't help but to think that all those lonely corpses must like to have children visiting, even squabling siblings.  

Bikedownpathcemetery

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