Hardscrabble Journal

Pilgrimage

Yesterday I took advantage of the quiet to make my sometimes-annual trek to the slave cemetery. I discovered it decades ago by chance. What used to be pastures and cropland is now a tangle of wild grapevines, greenbrier, multiflora rose, and bittersweet that are slowly consuming a struggling forest. The locals call this evolution “going back to the mountain.”

This cemetery would have been lost forever if it were not for bulbs and periwinkle groundcover. In the spring, as the first green starts to show in the woods, there is an obvious anomaly on an otherwise indistinct knoll. Small white flowers and delicate periwinkle grow in the middle of what is now nowhere. Close inspection reveals an unusual series of small stones, triangular or megalithic in nature, but obviously not put there by nature.

I then returned to pruning my vines.

Linden Vineyards / Learn More / Latest at Linden | Journal: March 23, 2020