Lost in Amethyst Country

Posted 1/22/20

Editor’s note: This is the final part in a series.

Morbid curiosity has long plagued me.

I’ve long wanted to peer inside a grave and see the skull, bones, perchance a gold ring on some …

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Lost in Amethyst Country

Posted

Editor’s note: This is the final part in a series.
Morbid curiosity has long plagued me.
I’ve long wanted to peer inside a grave and see the skull, bones, perchance a gold ring on some finger separated from its brethren.
I walked over and quietly placed my tripod and camera on the ground.
Getting closer, I saw a round white object. Closer still, flint rocks covered any chance to see bones.
I knelt, in reverence, and to see better. As I did, a cottontail rabbit bolted from the tomb scaring the hell out of me.
“Damn,” I said aloud. This resting place of a woman who died in 1865 had sent my heartbeat from 50 beats a minute to 106.
In all my cemetery explorations I have never seen so many broken and toppled tombstones.
One reads: “Although he sleeps, his memory doth live and cheering comforts to his mourners give / He followed virtue as his truest guide Lived as a Christian as a Christian died”
And another … “Thy form alone is all, thank God that the grave is given for we know thy soul the better part is safe yes, safe in heaven.”
To the right front of the church a wrought iron fence surrounds a stone coffin.
A cemetery tree, a thick cedar with bark shredding into ribbons, stands over the plot.
Toward sundown the sun turns the wrought iron shadows into comb-like teeth, and western light makes it hard to tell cedar roots from fallen limbs.
Life and death at a glance, but what struck me most was a window unlike the rest.
Its venetian blinds, broken and mangled, cascaded in an arc within a window whose panes bear bullet holes. We live in such a glorious age.
Friendship Baptist Church. I had taken so many random roads to come by it I had no idea where I was.
I was lost in amethyst country, but I drove on blind, knowing I’d find my way. And I did.
Close to Anthony Shoals I realized I was near my Granddad Walker’s old home place.
In my heart, I had come full circle.
As I drove by Mom’s childhood home, I realized just how this part of Georgia has avoided the modern blight that ruins all it touches.
Some will say this land is backwards. That it’s poor, no place to live, but I disagree.
It’s rich because of what it does not have. No cheesy strip malls. No dollar stores. Not even much as gas stations go.
Just old homes, old churches, and one cottontail rabbit that about gave me a heart attack.
Thanks to that startling moment and my amethyst country ramble, I came away feeling more alive than ever, a feeling folks mired in modern monotony miss.

down south, tom poland, amethyst country

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