Everyone knows that rapists hang out in graveyards on snow days
Give me a minute, and I'll explain the title.
So further proving that the apocalyse is nigh, Tennesse is AGAIN completely covered in snow. While for many areas of the mid and north state, this is not all that unusual, for Chattanooga it is a huge miracle. As I've said before, half a inch in January once every 3 years or so is about normal for Chattanooga. But we had three snowfalls last January, two snows in December (including a White Christmas!) and now this big Winter Storm dumped something like 7 inches on the Scenic City, definetly the most snow Chatttown has seen since the Blizzard of '93.
And I wasn't there to see it.
Oh, sure, up here in Franklin we got about 4 inches by the end of it, but when it snows like this I want to be at home, building Doctor Who snowmen and snow Daleks with my brother, pelting him with snowballs because he sucks at snowball fights, and sledding down the huge hill in our backyard.
Snowdays are almost depressing when it's just you snowed in alone. It's still a snowday, though. So I've still been pretty happy. Snow started late Sunday night, and the ground was covered by midnight. The next morning the world was covered in powdered sugar, and half the state was shut down. Yesterday morning there was still more snow, though not much more, but schools and colleges and most everything was still closed. Today my school, as well as most middle state colleges and universities, are back in session, but pretty much all the county public schools and what looks like most all private schools are still closed, or at least delayed. According to Mom back in Chattanooga, they've pretty much shut down the whole city and it doesn't look like that will be changing anytime soon. All the public and private schools are closed, (so she's out cuz she's a teacher), the colleges and stuff are closed, most businesses are shut down, and even most of the government things are closed. They aren't running garbage trucks or anything. I wouldn't be surprised it the postal service is sitting this one out, too. None of the backroads are being salted, and they are iced up so bad that even if the highways are salted no one with half a brain would risk getting to them.
I wonder how many salt trucks Chattanooga has. Weather Channel was saying yesterday that Atlanta (who got more snow than Chattanooga did, I think) only has about 8 trucks because they rarely have this kind of weather and so they rarely need even one truck. Same story in Chattanooga. If Atlanta only has 8, I'm willing to bet Chattanooga only has 2. Maybe 3. One for I-24, maybe one for I-75, maybe another one for all the mountain roads...
Yeah. Nashville gets more snow a year than Chattanooga does, so while even as much snow as we've had here would be enough to shut down Chattanooga, it wasn't that big a deal here. More salt trucks and things at the ready. The main roads are pretty much fine, I think, but most backroads are still "treacherous" according to the news. I'm only a couple minutes from school, and the roads I had to take were fine, but the parking lot at my apartment complex was nearly completely ice, and I nearly died just trying to get out of the parking lot.
And I don't own an ice scraper, so I had to use the nearest comparable thing available, which turned out to be the empty CD case to Owl City's album "Of June". (Dear Adam Young: Nothing personal, liked the album well enough, though it's not your best, I just needed to get to class and it was all I had. Love, Megan.)
ANYWAY. ABOUT MY SNOW DAYS.
So on Monday I go outside to enjoy the snow, and since the snow wasn't packing well enough for a snowman, and because it wasn't really too terribly cold if you bundled up, I decided to go for a walk. Now, across the street from my apartment complex is this big graveyard. Most of it is on this big flat field, but there's smaller, much, much older section that's on the side of hill. I've been thinking for a while of going on a walk through this cemetary, and since the only reason I would spent that much time outside when it is this cold is because of snow, I decided that that would be the perfect day to do it. So I grabbed my camera and headed out.
Before I show pictures, let me explain the title: So as I'm on my walk my dad calls to see how I am and how much snow we've gotten yadda yadda, and I tell him I'm taking a walk through a cemetary. Suddenly my dad has a mild freak-out in which he tells me to be super careful because wondering around on my own someone could grab me and take me away and no one would ever know.
I think I ended up settling for telling him it was an open field, so there wasn't really anywhere for people to hide. I sort of get why he's concerned. I mean, yeah, it's not safe to go wondering out on my own through dark alleys somewhere, and maybe he doesn't remember that the cemetary is just across the street and a big field, but let's examine the facts here, shall we?
Why I don't think I need to worry about getting kidnapped/raped in a cemetary on a snow day:
1. How many people do you know who go hang out in cemetaries on snow days? Other than kidnappers/rapists, supposedly.
2.How many kidnappers/rapists go hang out in cemetaries on snow days? Please refer to question 1. No kidnapper is going to go hang out in a cemetary on a snow day because who would they expect is going to come out there for them to attack?
3.It's a big field. Where are they going to hide? Behind a tombstone? Okay, maybe. But what kind of idiotic rapist is going to pick a graveyard to go hide in?
4. SNOW. Which means that even rapists are going to be huddled around a fire somewhere. Also, I was pretty darn sure I was alone in that graveyard for the same reason that any rapists in that graveyard would have known I was there if they were looking:
You sort of leave footprints in snow. So even if there was a rapist dumb/desperate enough to go hide behind a gravestone in a cemetary on a snow day, I'd know he was there because I'd see footprints. And any rapist smart/desperate enough to think to cover his tracks is also probably smart enough to go lie in wait somewhere where he's much more likely to actually find a victim.
Basically, I'm pretty sure a snow day is the safest day I could have chosen to go walking through the cemetary.
PICTURE TIME!!!
Ditch and trees behind the apartments.
Footprints heading out down one of the rows. So someone other than me came through the cemetary that day. Only one set of footprints; either they'd crossed through the cemetary to get to the road on the other side, or they were still wondering through it somewhere. Whoever they were, I never saw them.
As I wondered through the cemetary, a little concrete statue caught my eye, and I knew before I even got to it, before I even swept the snow off the figure, before I wiped away the snow covering the base and name, what it would probably say.
One little name, one date. Somebody's baby.
I still wonder about that name. 'Rene'. Not a common name. I wonder if it is 'reen' as in 'Irene', or if it is an alternate spelling of 'Renee'.
I came across a couple of little angel statues. Breaks my heart every time. The most curious one was this one, though.
When I first stumbled upon it, this is what I saw:
A headless angel, and a snowcovered Santa Mickey Mouse toy.
And on the other side, this:
A tiny nativity scene. So I began clearing the snow from around the base, looking for a name plate. New wonders: more little Christmas toys that'd been buried by the snow. A little Christmas tree, a stuffed Santa, and there were what looked like prayer beads wrapped around the figure. I dug the little toys out of the snow and set them up right and dusted some of the snow off. It just seemed like the right thing to do. But for all these things that, from the look of them, had been placed fairly recently, because they weren't dirty, just snowcovered, I didn't see any sign of a date or a name.
Such a mystery. The statue was clearly quite old, and had been headless for quite a while, but these were modern toys set around it fairly recently. Why? By whom? For whom? I'm guessing that this little statue is in memory of a baby or a child, given that most baby graves I've seen have little angels watching over them, and given that the little toys are not usually what would be lain at an adult's grave. But why no name? And who would be still be laying these things on such an old grave?
Perhaps there is no name or date because it was for a child that never made it to birth? Perhaps it is there in memory of a child miscarried? Or even aborted? All over Japan there are little shrines: little stones with a little apron, put there by family as a prayer for the souls of infants who were aborted or miscarried. (Although from the sound of it, this was more a thing done for aborted babies by would-be mothers as a sort of penance or apology to their unwanted child. It wasn't so much to say that they regretted their decision, as much as it was a way of excusing it.) I wonder if this little statue had a similar purpose: a memorial for an unborn child, perhaps.
One such little shrine in Japan. I can't remember what city we were in when I took this picture, though. (I took a school-sponsered trip to Japan in Februrary of my senior year, in case I've never mentioned that.)
Anyway, I can't stop wondering about that little headless angel, and who she might be standing there for.
Moving on, I found some headstones that I just thought were pretty:
I wondered into the more recent area of the cemetary, where I started to see a lot of graves like these:
Sorry it's so big, but I wanted the names to be visible.
Things like this. People who spent their whole lives together, or at least most of it.
Here's to Melvin and Ernestine, and everybody else who actually made it work.
I eventually wondered into the old part of the cemetary, the one housing graves from the 19th century, some probably old enough to be from the civil war.
The picture isn't crooked. The landscape is.
Most of the gravestones around this area look like this:
It's cracked and faded, in case you can't tell. Even the things we leave behind in our memory are ultimately as ephemeral as we are. Many of the graves in this part of the cemetary are little more than worn nubs.
I really like this one. These statues were nearly life-size, and they looked so beautiful out there in the silence and the snow.
It was such a peaceful, quite place, that cemetary. So beautiful, covered in snow. And even in a place like that, every now and then you'd find the kind of thing that made you laugh.
"MISS FANTASTIK FROM ENGLAND"
I swear I'm not making this up. There was no other engraving, no other name, no date. Just that. Right near the angels. I'd love to know the story here. The graves it was near were awfully old, so even though this might be a pet's name...it was too new for it to be associated with the graves around it. Maybe someone got a discount on burying their pet there? Was it a pet? Or a person?
I'll never know. But whoever you are, Miss Fantastik from England, here's to you.