Fun in the Cemetery

in Lawrenceville, Illinois
Panoramic of a cemetery road at sunset. Woman rubbing dates off a headstone. Rubbing of a flat headstone in the grass with the year 1785. Headstone rubbings showing various dates and insignias. Headstone rubbings showing various dates. Pink and orange sky over a field of headstones. Pink and purple sky with trees on the horizon. Pink, purple, and blue clouds in the sky.

My grandma lives near the cemetery in her small Illinois town. All my life I have played in this graveyard, and as we got older playing became a wonderful tradition of sunset walks. It's a beautiful spot for sunsets.

I have memorized so many of the names in the cemetery, learned long ago as my cousins and I would play hide and seek at dusk. It is an old, old cemetery with graves dating back to 1760. Some headstones have references to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and of course all the modern ones as well.

One night while we were visiting, we decided to take crayons and paper out and make rubbings of the oldest headstones we could. We fared well, finding many stones dating back to the 1700s. The oldest two were a man born in 1760 and another who died in 1785.

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