A Blog Anniversary, Plus Sugar Makes a Plan

Seven years. Wow, seven years of blogging!

I find that I don’t blog much in July. I’m not sure what that means. Too hot? Maybe, but the air conditioner works (thank you Lord). Too depressed? Not this year, but there have been years it was so. Too lazy? That might be the root of it. 

I used to pressure myself to write, even though my writing is more picture-book-style. I admire those people who write without bolstering their work with photos. I need photos in my writing. 

And therein lies a plan. Sugar has one. His plan involves action, which requires that I remove myself from whatever horizontal surface I have requisitioned, and make sure the camera batteries and the cell phone are both fully charged. 

Annnnd we’re off to the graveyard. 

He has a plan that I won’t reveal yet, but it involves space, real estate, and measurements. 

Remember how last year we found a new memorial at the Black Swamp Baptist Church? AgainWeMustGoNow. 

  
Do you see the squarish block on the ground behind the marker? We think that marks the corner of the plot and that the marker is therefore straddling the plot boundaries. We think. 

  

 

Wouldn’t that make the square, blockish thing in the foreground to be another corner marker? And say, if someone wanted to have another memorial marker installed, that there would be room? Martha Mosse Lawton is to the right. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind a neighbor. 

  

There’s a tall memorial in the plot next door under the magnolia tree. I took a photo of it as a reference. When I got home, I found that there was already a memorial on findagrave, complete with inscription, but no photo. 

 
This is Robert E. Sweat who died at Culpepper Court House, Virginia, on August 19, 1861. If I read the monument correctly, he is not buried here. This type of marker that commemorates a person who is buried somewhere else, perhaps even in an unknown location, is called a cenotaph. 

There’s a little marker next to Robert Sweat’s marker for someone that Sugar called Aunt Graham. He wanted me to get a photo, but there were some vines growing over some of the words, and it was so frickin’ hot in July that I thought I might topple over if I bent down to pull the vines. Plus I have some kind of weird sensory disorder that I don’t like to get my hands dirty, coupled with the fact that I pulled some vines back in early 1979 during the winter when they were unidentifiable, and they were of a poison type and the oils got onto my hands and of course onto my face. Said face swelled up like a water balloon and I thought I was going blind.  My then-husband, Mr. Satan, made me sleep on the couch, even though I was the sick one on lots of meds. Which has nothing to do with Sugar’s plan or Aunt Graham. 
Later, when we got home, Sugar fussed a little that I had not gotten a photo of Aunt Graham’s marker. And I cussed that he could have pulled the vines, and what was the big freaking deal about Aunt Graham. Who even was she?!

Y’all, I should have stepped up and gone to the car for a pair of scissors and clipped the vines. Aunt Graham is Martha Mosse Lawton’s mother’s sister. 

*****

We wandered around a bit more, and I went to the far corner, farthest from the church. There were two markers. One was toppled off its base. Both were discolored. 

  

J. S. Scott, 1866-1908. 

  

Mother

Mamie Tannings

1866-1911

I don’t know who these folks are, but maybe the Internet can solve that mystery. 

And Sugar? He’s got a plan.