The Gravestone Project

All that nonsense about not doing any more cemetery stuff until the weather gets cooler pretty much went out the window last week when I discovered The Gravestone Project, courtesy of EarthTrek (although I'd like to point out that I did admit that decisionw ould probably only last until I saw something irresistibly interesting).

For the record, I'm an enthusiastic, if recent, fan of "citizen science" programs in general, partly because they're a clever and cost-effective way for researchers to gather certain kinds of basic but important data, partly because they're a really great hands-on public relations and educational tool, and partly because they're a nice combination of fun, worthwhile, and interesting (I'm working on a whole other blog post about the social and cultural implications of programs like EarthTrek, sites like Find-A-Grave, and other sites and programs that link online presence with offline task completion).

The Gravestone Project aims to plot global patterns in the severity of "acid rain" based on erosion of marble, which is particularly susceptible to its effects. This is accomplished by measuring marble gravestones and comparing their thickness at the base (which is less exposed to rain), the sides about midway up (which are slightly more exposed to rain) and the top (which is the most exposed), and comparing the difference in thickness (the amount of erosion, in other words). That difference, based on the age of the gravestone, lets the researchers calculate the extent of acid rain erosion during that time period in that location.

It seems like a worthwhile project, and I expect that seeking out marble gravestones and taking the measurements will give me something additional to do on cemetery outings, along with Find-A-Grave requests and my own iconography studies. If anyone is already involved in Find-A-Grave, this might be something worth considering.

I got a nice shiny set of digital calipers on Amazon (for about ten dollars including shipping); they just arrived in the mail today, so I'm all set to get started. I'm excited; I haven't measured things in the field since graduate school.

(cross-posted on my personal blog, One Day at a Time, and my gravestone and cemetery blog, Last Words)

Cool Note About Peat Bogs and Local Crafts

Cross-posted on my personal blog, One Day at a Time.

A recent post about bog bodies on Bones Don't Lie reminded me how awesome and interesting peat bogs are. The part of me that will always think of myself of an archaeologist is fascinated by their preservation potential.

On his way home for R&R just before our wedding last year, Greg's flight stopped in Ireland, and he brought home this gorgeous carving.

It was made by these people by kiln-firing and carving bog turf that's several thousand years old- older than some of the finds in that post I linked. My inner archaeologist had a "Squeee!" moment over that, and locally-crafted products are something else I'm a fan of.

I had a professor in college whose home office was decorated entirely with souvenirs his students had brought him over the years from their trips abroad; someday I imagine us having a similar room full of things Greg has brought back from these "business trips" the Army keeps sending him on.

This is EXACTLY What I Mean! Smurfs and Gender Identity

This is exactly what I meant in my previous rant about gender biases in children's media.

Philip N. Cohen posted a great article on Family Inequality about Smurfette.

I'm told that there are valid backstory reasons for having only one female Smurf (if you actually want to talk about validity and backstories and canon in reference to The Smurfs), and honestly it just struck me as the kind of careless world-design you can get away with in cartoons for very small children- look at the original Transformers cartoons for another good example of that. I never gave the Smurfs much thought beyond that bit of silliness; they didn't seem worth it, especially since children's culture really isn't my cup of tea and I'm much busier being a Transformers fangirl-in-training. As an interesting note about how Internet browsing works, I followed a link from Powered by Osteons on Twitter to an interesting article about hilariously misinterpreted demographic data, and from that I followed the link to the Smurfette article.

Dr. Cohen posted an image of the poster being used to advertise the Smurfs Happy Meals (yes, I love my gender-biased messages with a side order of grease and fat).

"This one likes to cook, this one is smart, this one is athletic, and this one is a girl. That's who she is and what she does." That's the message here.

This seems to be a recurring theme in children's toys and media; one gender gets to define itself in ways not tied to a gender identity- interests, hobbies, goals, skills- and the other is continually encouraged to define itself solely based on its gender identity.

Jonesville Cemetery (Photography by Dunerat)

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

This is the blog post I've been looking forward to writing all week!

Since we were on vacation in the Atlanta area last week, I couldn't resist the lure of some of the area's great historical cemeteries. We had a ton of sightseeing planned already, and the primary focus of the trip was visiting family, so I knew I couldn't actually spend the entire week dragging my poor husband around a bunch of cemeteries, no matter how excited I was about them, which meant I needed to pick one I that was really excited about.

Unfortunately for Greg, he can't resist my jumping-up-and-down excitement any more than I can resist his, which is not at all.

I borrowed my father-in-law's computer to hop on Find-A-Grave (which launched some interesting conversations because he is a genealogy enthusiast himself) and searched for photo requests in the area. There were several open, and I picked out a few likely prospects from among the cemeteries listed; my particular interest is older graves. The iconography fascinates me, as it has since I first read about it as an example for applying a battleship curve to typological seriation back in my undergraduate archaeology classes (. I'm perfectly happy to fulfill photo requests for more recent interments, of course, but I get especially excited about historical ones.

The notes on the Find-A-Grave page for Jonesville Cemetery grabbed my attention. "This cemetery was recently uncovered. It contains the graves of freed slaves. The Mt Sinai Baptist Church is clearing the land for the cemetery." The page listed only four interments in the cemetery, none of which had photos. I was instantly thrilled by the prospect of tackling this project- a very historically interesting, mostly undocumented cemetery belonging to an often-overlooked segment of the population. As an added bonus, it sounded small enough to make a manageable morning outing, which was a selling point in presenting the idea to my husband.

A quick Google search turned up a couple of local news articles which provided some further information and heightened my interest. The cemetery is located on Dobbins Air Reserve Base, not far inside the gate.

The helpful duty staffer at Dobbins gave us good, clear directions, and despite his insistence that the cemetery was "pretty hard to find," we walked right to it and wondered what on earth he was talking about when he said that. It was a bit secluded, but the fenceline was readily visible from the path we had been directed to, and the gate was standing open when we arrived, giving us our first glimpse of a sparse handful of gravestones half-hidden among brush and overgrowth.


We were both surprised at the sheer amount of overgrowth in the cemetery, given the enthusiastic news articles about clearing, cleanup, and more planned work days. Only the northern portion of the cemetery was clear enough to walk through. The southern end of the fenced property was still too densely overgrown to penetrate at all, or to glimpse any gravestones in, if any were there. I haven't yet spoken to anyone at Mt. Sinai Baptist Church to find out what stage their cleanup effort is in and what activity has taken place since the first round of news articles in early 2011, but my best guess is that their efforts this past winter focused on the northern end of the cemetery for one reason or another, and that those efforts could not prevent spring and summer's growth of dense foliage.

The cemetery was alive with swarms of mosquitoes and yellowjackets, and within minutes I was regretting having packed only my favorite pair fo flip-flops for our entire trip; I had itchy feet the whole way home. Even my usually bug-immune husband was swatting at mosquitoes and went home with a few itchy bites, though thankfully we avoided any repeats of the yellowjacket incident at our wedding- not for lack of recklessly stomping where I pleased without regard to where the silly things were buzzing around. The whole experience definitely felt more like a crazy wilderness adventure than the sedate stroll through a historical cemetery that I had been expecting earlier in the week. Fortunately, I like that kind of thing.

In the accessible northern section of the cemetery, the plant growth was still daunting, and we found ourselves wading through tall weeds and occasional thorns and burrs to make our way from grave to grave, and getting a photograph of most of the markers meant clearing away varying amounts of foliage first; we made sure to get before- and after-clearing images, partially because, thanks to having been an archaeology student in a former life, I believe in documenting any changes made to the site, and partially just to illustrate the overgrown state of the cemetery.

The photo request that drew us to Jonesville Cemetery in the first place was for Rebecca Bedford (1865-1908) whose children touchingly memorialized her as simply "OUR MOTHER." Sadly, we found her marker lying under a tree, broken and lying on its own base.


Mrs. Bedford's marker was in otherwise in good condition, only slightly weatherworn; the clasped-hands engraving was still clearly visible, and the epitaph was legible (except for the last line being partially obscured by the stone's breakage).


Mrs. Bedford's gravestone was one of the last we found, though; we found ten interments during our morning's exploration, including the double-interment of L.B. and Rosa Moore. Their double headstone was lying flat on the ground, though it did not appear damaged; it was almost totally obscured by weeds and underbush when we noticed it after the pair of footstones bearing the initials L.B.M. and R.M. caught our attention.


Upon clearing, only the surname "MOORE" was visible in capital letters. Lifting the marker to see if anything was engraved on the other side wasn't really an option with just the two of us there, so we were left with only a pair of initials and no birthdates, deathdates, epitaphs, or other information about the couple interred there.


Only later, when we found a small gravestone mostly hidden by a bush, did we have any clue to the Moores' identity. Hidden among the leaves of the bush growing wild next to the mostly cleared grave of Annie Roberson (1823-1892), Greg spotted a tiny bright glimpse of stone.


With the foliage carefully cleared away, we discovered a small gravestone with a lamb engraved above the epitaph- traditionally, but not always (as I learned at McBryde Cemetery earlier this week) an indicator of a child's grave. We had found the grave of little Janie Moore (1891-1893), whose epitaph identifies her as the "DAU. OF L.B. AND ROSA MOORE." We suddenly had names and a family connection for the Moores.


The verse reads:

"Asleep in Jesus
Oh, how sweet.
To be with such a
blessing meet."

This seems to be a modified version of an excerpt from the hymn "Asleep in Jesus":

"Asleep in Jesus!
O how sweet
To be with such a slumber meet."

Some interesting background and theological commentary on this hymn can be found here.

It is unclear why Janie Moore was buried separately from her parents, alongside Annie Roberson. Perhaps she was some relation.

In trying to find further information on the burials at Jonesville, the best source my internet research turned up was a publication by the Cobb County Genealogical Society which purported to include a listing of burials in several cemeteries including Jonesville. According to the Cobb County Library, which is very kindly sending me scans of the relevant pages, the list contains 27 marked burials.

According to an official of the Cobb Cemetery Commission, cited in this article in the Marietta Daily Journal, "at least 36 graves" were located during cleanup efforts in February 2011; the article notes that "Most are unmarked, but a few have headstones or fieldstones [...]." We did notice numerous orange marker flags placed in the ground throughout the cemetery during our visit, which we supposed to be indicators of important features such as burials or section markers (only in retrospect did I realize they must all be marker burials), but we did not think to count them at the time.


In the absence of markers, I'm curious about how the volunteers identified burial locations. Most of the orange flags we noticed were either obviously associated with a marker, or placed in or near a depression in the ground, which is a characteristic visual indicator of a possible burial but not definite proof. Ground-penetrating radar is a common tool for locating unmarked burials, but it doesn't seem likely that the Jonesville volunteers would have used that; I say this partially because the effort didn't seem well-funded enough to have access to that kind of resource, but mostly because none of the media reports mentioned it, and shiny technology usually makes such good copy that it draws most of the focus, so the odds of its omission are pretty small.

That's a question I'm planning to ask Mt. Sinai and the Cemetery Commission.

We did notice several unengraved fieldstones, like this one, several of which had orange flags nearby. I made a mistake in assuming at the time that they were section or lot markers, since other cemeteries do use similar stones for the purpose.


For the gravestones that we were able to locate, the iconography of Jonesville Cemetery is an interesting but not especially unusual assemblage. 3 of the 10 gravestones featured a clasping-hands motif. Henry Middlebrooks (d. 1917)'s gravestone features this motif in the form of a pair of clasping hands in the foreground over a heart in the background.

My current favorite gravestone iconography resource, Stories in Stone by Douglas Keister, notes that clasped hands are traditionally a matrimonial symbol, especially if the sleeve attached to one hand appears to belong to a woman's clothing and the other to a man's; otherwise, the symbolism "can represent a heavenly welcome or an earthly farewell" (p. 108). The sleeves on both hands in Mr. Middlebrooks' engraving appear very similar and therefore probably belong to the same gender's clothing, or else the engraving is insufficiently preserved to reveal any details to the contrary. However, Keister also notes that the heart is a common matrimonial symbol in "modern tombstones," so it is difficult to draw a firm conclusion.

He was a Christian and a worthy mem
ber of the Marietta Law
and Order League.
W.M. Pack
Archon

I haven't yet succeeded in finding any information about the Marietta Law and Order League.

Like Henry Middlebrooks, Rebecca Bedford's 1908 clasped hands, the earliest of the three, bear no clear indicators of their gender, potentially due to weathering of the stone.


Ophelia Jackson (1845-1930) also has a pair of clasping hands on her gravestone, shown below a blank scroll (I have to wonder whether it was ever meant to have anything inscribed in that blank space); these are clearly a man's hand and a woman's hand; the sleeve of the hand on the viewer's left appears distinctly feminine.


The male-female pairing in this engraving may indicate matrimony or it may be a personal touch on the imagery of her farewell to a mortal loved one or her greeting by God. There is no way to be sure of either possibility, but the inscription below the dates of her birth and death reads "Faithful unto death."

OPHELIA
JACKSON
BORN JAN. 1845
DIED AT COTTAGE HILL
MARIETTA, GA.
APR. !7, 1930
"Faithful unto death"

Two of the ten Jonesville stones- Alice Bunyon (1874-1910) and Mollie Owens (1860-1902) feature images of a hand pointing upward, a symbol of the soul's ascension heavenward (Keister p. 108).


Interestingly, both images feature the same scalloped border in the circle around the hands, and the stones themselves are also remarkably similar, indicating that they may have come from the same manufacturer, eight years apart (which may have interesting implications regarding the overall business of gravestone production in the area, and on a smaller scale, may reveal something about at least one business in the community of Jonesville).


Mollie Owens's stone is very weathered, and both the image and the epitaph are very faint:

IN MEMORY TO MY
DEAR MOTHER
MOLLIE OWENS
DIED
FEB. 17, 1902
AGE 42 YRS.

Alice Bunyon's stone is much clearer:

IN MEMORY TO MY
DEAR WIFE
ALICE BUNYON

DIED
JUNE 29, 1910
AGE 36 YRS.

Given the formal similarities of the epitaphs, I'm inclined to wonder whether that's the result of the gravestones coming from the same manufacturer, or whether Mrs. Owens and Mrs. Bunyon were part of the same family.

Janie Moore's marker features the lamb iconography already discussed. Beside her, Annie Roberson's gravestone is decorated with a floral motif which is now somewhat faint.

"Write, blessed are the dead
which die in the Lord, from
henceforth, they do rest
from their labors and their
works do follow them."
Good and faithful Servant,
of Zion's travelers.

Annie Roberson's epitaph is from the instruction to John in Revelation 14:13, King James Version.

Of the remaining gravestone, L.B. and Rosa Moore's shared headstone cannot be seen on one side, and A. Beach (1834-1909) bears no iconography and a very simple epitaph.

A. BEACH
DIED
JAN. 22, 1909
AGE 75 YRS.

My husband very good-naturedly came along on this trip as my photographer; he is much more serious about photography as a hobby than I am, and as a result he's also much more experienced and knowledgeable, and thus simply better at it. Still, this was both of our first real attempt at photographing gravestones in particular, and the combination of worn and faded gravestones with dappled sunlight and shadow from overhanging trees presented an interesting challenge. Several of our pictures were taken with me looming at some awkward angle over the gravestone to shadow it evenly while Greg took the picture, sometimes standing at an awkward angle himself or shooting between my legs or under my arm to get the correct perspective for the shot.

Overall, it was a much more challenging, but much more interesting, exciting, and rewarding experience than I had planned for, and Greg was wonderfully patient about the project turning out to be larger and more involved than I had briefed him for. He's awesome like that.

So far, I've already contributed some significant documentation and a nice pile of photos to the Find-A-Grave record, which will hopefully help some genealogical researcher with his own project. I am hoping for a chance to revisit the site in December to take some measurements for a proper scale map of the cemetery; hopefully access the southern half of the property once the summer foliage has died off for the winter; pay more attention to those unmarked fieldstones; and make rubbings of the markers, once I have a few months of practice to work with. In the meantime, I have that burial listing on the way from the Cobb County Library, which will hopefully give me some more data to add to the records on Find-A-rave and my own notes; I'm also planning to contact the church and the Cemetery Commission next week for information on what work is still being done at the cemetery, what methods were used for identifying unmarked burials, and any available background information about the community.

Followup thoughts on gender

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

As soon as I finished my last post, the resulting discussion with my husband (who is much more thorough and detail-oriented than I am, and who therefore read all the comments on that Edmonton Journal article I linked) led me to find the link to this article in the sidebar. It features another Canadian couple who, beginning in the early 1990s, made a decision to that of Storm's parents to keep the sexes of their two children (both daughters, both now in their late teens) a private matter.

I rather sadly wish that I had found it before I published that last post, and I've spent the last few minutes debating whether to go back and revise.

Despite the fact that I am sitting in the emergency room at the moment, waiting for my accident-prone-Army-wife friend to get herself X-rayed (yes, the ER on post has wireless internet; I can't decide whether to be quietly grateful for this fact or alarmed that I've been here enough to know it), this article made me want to hop out of my chair and do a happy-dance.

Highlights:

"The couple also made other decisions to keep gender stereotypes out of their household while the kids were growing up. Gender-specific toys, such as Barbie dolls, were not found in the girls' toy box.

"That came more naturally, since our priority was to provide them with toys that encouraged creativity and thought (and) stereotypical toys tend not to," he said. 'In dressing them . . . the goal was not to be somehow generic, but to put them into sensible and attractive clothing in the colours we (and later they) wanted, which meant picking such clothes off whatever rack we happened to find them on.'"

Yes!

Toward the end of the article, an American psychologist named Judith Rich Harris saying "Their philosophy seems to be based on the idea that male and female are artificial categories imposed by society."

Well... exactly, in a certain sense. Denying biological gender difference, including some evolutionarily programmed behavioral tendencies, would be ludicrous, but the cultural roles we define as "male" and "female" are largely (albeit not entirely) artificial creations, and I see little point in imposing them as if they were biologically unavoidable.

Some thoughts on gender.

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

I am not as prolific a reader of blogs as many of my fellow-bloggers seem to be, which seems a little hypocritical, but I am picky about what I read and somewhat inconsistent about keeping up with things even when I mean to; my blog reading, much like my comic reading, tends to happen in fits and spurts of long neglect and catch-up marathons. Now that I think of it, that also characterizes my writing habits, so maybe it is not so hypocritical after all. Despite that, though, Powered by Osteons is a regular favorite of mine, and I was delighted today (while looking for something to do with the last hour or so of my afternoon at work now that all the work to do is done and my Dean Koontz novel is finished, much to my dismay) to find this post.

I remember the Berenstain Bears fondly from my own childhood; they were favorites whose characters were almost like friends, and remained so well after my reading level progressed past picture books. Looking back as an adult, particularly as an adult with an anthropology degree and decidedly liberal humanist ideas about gender roles and identity, I can definitely see and agree with Dr. Killgrove's point. Examined critically enough, the fact the characters are named by their roles in adult and child version of a gender dichotomy- Mama/Papa, Brother/Sister- instead of with actual names seems a little creepy.

That might be a little too critical, though. I was an avid reader of the Berenstain Bears as a child, and if there was a gender-polarized message in the books or their characters, I think anyone who knows me today would attest that I apparently missed it even on a subconscious level. I grew up with Sister Bear and her frilly pink overalls and Mama Bear and her constant long dresses- but I also grew up with me in my shorts and t-shirts and Mom in similar attire, and looking back, I think that I interpreted the Bears as what they were- fiction. Real people didn't dress that way on a regular basis any more than real anthropomorphic bears wore clothes at all or went to school (everyone knows that anthropomorphic bears are naked and illiterate). It didn't impact my worldview on any level.

If I were a parent, I would definitely be concerned about the lessons learned from, and the behaviors and norms modeled by, the Berenstain Bears and other heavily gendered children's media. I respect and admire- and would like to think that I would, if ever forced into such a situation, emulate- Dr. Killgrove's approach to dealing with those concerns. Censorship of ideas is more dangerous and more reprehensible than the ideas themselves in any case, and merely hiding children's eyes from things only leaves them naive and sheltered, rather than teaching and equipping them to evaluate ideas with their own reasoning minds. Her decision to share the books with her daughter but engage the child in critical discussion of its contents is, in my mind, brilliant and responsible.

Children's books may contain less gender-stereotyping than their toys, however. A while back, I read this article by Crystal Smith on the gendered use of vocabulary in toy advertisements. Some concerns were raised by several commenters about the author's methodology in collecting and structuring her data, and I have some concerns about her classification system, but personally, I found the study's subjective observations far more compelling than its quantitative aspects anyway.

The author notes that toys clearly marketed at boys- toys with primarily or solely boys in their commercials, for instance- tend to be related to non-domestic work roles (dump trucks, construction and tool playsets), driving, or fighting (action figures, toy guns), while toys clearly marketed toward girls- toys with primarily or solely girls in their commercials, for instance- tend to be related to domestic work roles (toy vacuums, kitchen playsets), fashion and cosmetics, or nurturing (baby dolls). Smith, author of The Achilles Effect (which, as a disclaimer, I have not read), writes from the perspective of concern that this sort of marketing is harmful because it promotes aggression to young boys, so she touches only lightly on its effect on girls.

The issue for me is that most of what she classifies as "fighting" toys are either linked to TV shows or movies with actual storylines and at least somewhat developed characters, meant to be used in active play (chasing each other around with Nerf guns, for instance), or both. The girls' toys, in contrast, are mostly sedentary (vacuuming notwithstanding) and seldom linked to a familiar plot or developed characters. Boys, therefore, gain some things from their conventionally encouraged forms of play that girls are being steered away from.

Smith's reply to a comment on her article accurately observes that "The characteristics of these toys, which are masculinised by names and pronouns, also hew to stereotypes—they are about fighting and working (although the Big Rigs do sing and dance, which are not actions one would expect from a big bulky truck.) Compare the “purpose” of these toys with that of the girls’ toys who are predominantly female and designed to be accessorized or cuddled, but not much else. Most do not have jobs and they don’t fight."

The stereotype at work here seems to extend into adult life. In the workplace, women have achieved approximate parity with men in general, with exceptions in specific fields which are changing as we speaking- yet in nearly every television sitcom I have seen recently (more than I care to admit- see below) I have noticed that the female leads are more likely to be stay-at-home moms with working husbands, usually in couples who don't appear to actually share any hobbies or common interests outside of the children (in whom the husband is usually mostly disinterested). In fact, in most of these fictional families, the man is the only one who has apparent outside interests or is able to pursue them.

Women are generally stereotyped as being uninterested in sports, video games, comics, cars, etc.- essentially, in anything not about hair, makeup, housework, babies, or feelings. In my own life, I am frequently met with surprise when a new acquaintance learns that I am a female gamer / sci-fi fan / comic reader / firearms enthusiast (although several recent studies indicate that I am not that unusual in regard to gaming, and Felicia Day is giving us all a kickass example). It still seems that the societal expectation, perpetuated by our toys, is that while both boys and girls can work, in our off time, the boys get to have hobbies and the girls are supposed to be interested only in looking pretty and being nurturing. That's a terrifying thought, as it seems to encourage girls to be less than full-developed, well-rounded people. One of the comments on Smith's article says, "Adventure and imaginative play are where it’s at. I think that’s really what any child wants, regardless of gender." Amen.

All in all, I think the general message here is that society may be pushing gender roles, especially in terms of interests and likes or dislikes, on children much too early. We tend to leave the TV in the funeral home office on during the day for background noise. As a result, I've seen full runs of three or four TV sitcoms in the last year which I otherwise would have ignored totally if left to my own devices (see above). Thus, I have twice viewed an episode of Yes, Dear in which the main character's mother upbraids her daughter-in-law because the main character's infant daughter is dressed "like a boy." She insists on taking the child out to buy some girlier clothes so that total strangers can look at her and tell that she is female. Although the mother-in-law character is meant to be obnoxious and overbearing, like her stereotypical counterparts, I still find the episode to be the philosophical equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.

For one thing, the kid is still in a stroller. I realize that gender identification is a big part of how we humans navigate social interaction, but when dealing with a child who is still stumbling across the threshold from infant to toddler, is it really that important to know if the child is a boy or a girl? Will it really affect how an adult interacts with the child? More importantly, should it? I find the idea either absurd or troubling, depending on the answers to those questions.

Besides, I personally viewed the child's clothing as gender-neutral, which perhaps raises a whole other set of issues. I can walk around town in most of my husband's clothes, and though I might look a little frumpy since they're mostly all a little baggy on me, I'm not going to look exceptionally odd, and probably no one is going to declare me a cross-dresser; if he were to walk around in a random selection of my clothes, though, he's got about a fifty percent chance of standing out in most people's perception as crossing a clear gender boundary, regardless of whether those people approve or disapprove of that action. "Masculine" styles are more frequently seen as potentially unisex or neutral, but overtly "feminine" styles are more clearly gender-polarized.

It was after viewing that episode of Yes, Dear that I heard about the Stocker-Witterick household in Canada who recently made the apparently controversial decision to keep their newborn child's sex a secret from everyone outside its immediate family, to shield the kid from the sorts of pressures and biases I have just been going on about. Dr. Killgrove's blog post includes a link to a statement on the matter by Mrs. Witterick herself; interestingly, her five-year-old son raised the initial question that led to the family's decision. I'm not sure I would do it myself, but I honestly think it's a pretty cool idea and I'm curious to see where it leads.

Flowers and seashells

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

A few days ago, I was setting up our chapel here at the funeral home for a visitation, carrying flowers from the delivery room in the back of our building, across the hall to arrange them on stands near the casket at the front of the chapel.

It reminded me of another afternoon of carrying flowers, early on in my time here, when I remarked to my boss that the arrangement I had in my arms, and could barely see over the top of, smelled nice. He growled back something along the lines of "They're damn funeral flowers. They never smell nice."

Maybe I haven't been in this business long enough to be jaded, because I still think they're pretty. Then again, I'm a little strange. The whole issue reminds me of doing human remains detection with my canine SAR team in Crystal Beach after Hurricane Ike.

The relatively undamaged elementary school- a big, sturdy building built on huge concrete pylons- where our base of operations had been established was less than a quarter of a mile from the beach.


We had been working the bay side of the peninsula all morning, pretty enough underneath the debris, but plagued by homicidal biting flies that make me itch even now just thinking about them and bordered by the muddy, silty, unappealing banks of the channel, and I hadn't been to the beach in over a year at that point, not since the last coast trip with the Sailing Club back in college. There was no way in hell I was going to be that close and not at least see the ocean, disaster zone or not.

It's bad policy, in a disaster zone, to just go strolling off by yourself. There could be any number of hazards, human and otherwise, and even if you're impervious to damage, like me, it creates a lot of undue stress for those responsible for keeping track of people. So, a teammate- herself a product of the coast, just a different coast- walked down to the beach with me. I've never seen the water at Bolivar look so clear and clean; it was as though the storm had washed it free of the usual combination of Mississippi River silt burden and industrial filth that produced the familiar grayish brown murk I remembered.


A few seagulls had begun to return; we had seen the first few on the ferry crossing, and my team leader declared them a sign of hope. Even with bare foundations and shattered homes in the background, the beach was more beautiful than I had ever seen it.

Perhaps it was so beautiful because of the destruction in the background, because the contrast emphasized that peace and serenity had returned, that the Gulf's fury could wash away everything human hands had made, but not beauty and light.

I always pick up seashells at the beach. Usually I just find one or two in a stroll, a small memento of the day's trip. Most of the ones in my collection, until recently, I could still assign to a specific memory, a specific outing. This one from the afternoon at Follett's Island with my parents on Mother's Day my last year in high school (the day I wrote a haiku about), these from a motorcycle outing with Daddy, and that one from the afternoon my college roommates and I decided to try surfing and I broke my toe.

I have discovered that seashell-hunting with Greg is a larger-scale operation entirely, and the last time we went to the beach, I may have had to whine and throw a tantrum to get the man out onto the beach with me, but once he got there he was insatiable, and we left with two plastic drinking cups full of shells.

I love my husband. Speaking of light in the darkness, he is mine.

Thus, as the sun was setting over Bolivar Peninsula, at the end of a long day of slogging through marshes and brush, and over debris that that once been homes, looking for and not finding the missing dead, I literally skipped over to my team leader, who was as weary and filthy and stinky as I was, and cheerfully announced, "Look, Fearless Leader! I found seashells."

He looked at me like I was nuts, and maybe I am, but you've got to cope somehow.

We were sitting around here at work the other day, talking about people's reaction to our occupation (the funeral director I share an office with says that she has heard people rudely unwilling to eat anything she baked for her church once they found out what she did for a living, and the girls at the local car wash are apparently annoyingly reluctant to wash the funeral coach when it's brought in). My office-mate told me that someone interviewed her and our boss shortly after she came here, and asked her if working at the funeral home made her sad.

I suppose I can understand the question, but for me the funeral home is not a sad place. The sadness- the moment of loss- happens elsewhere. This is a place for grieving, yes, but that grieving is the beginning of the healing process, and the service we provide, at its most fundamental level, is to facilitate the beginnings of healing. This isn't a place of sadness; it is a place of coping, of comfort, of eventual hope.

That's the underlying purpose of human remains detection, too- to bring closure, and sometimes justice, so that that process of grief and healing and life can begin more easily for those we help.

Part of my role in that, and part of my role in life in general, is to find the bright spots amid the darkness, the moments of levity amid rubble and the beauty in a rite of mourning. The world is full of death, darkness, and destruction, which I walk in by choice to do what good I can, but the seashells and the clear ocean are still beautiful, and the flowers still smell sweet.


It would never be worth it, otherwise.