Fragments From Floyd

Three gravestones sit back above the branch, away from the single-lane dirt road that has barely changed since the days the first settlers followed the headwaters of Goose Creek up the valley through the Rhododendron. We had walked down this road, "our road", many, many times for three years before we noticed the little cemetery behind our nearest neighbors' place. The house belongs in her family and she and her husband come several times a year, when their health will allow, to the house as a get-a-way from city life. They won't be back until Easter and have said we could walk their land any time, though we seldom do. Yesterday, we did.

The stone on the left belongs to A. W. Boone, born 1830, died 1886. His wife --21 years his junior-- is buried next to him; and the third is that of a child aged 2 years. It was A. W. Boone's sons who built the house we live in, not long after their father settled in this valley after the Civil War.

Where I stood to take this picture, Mr. Boone once stood. He might have pointed with the end of a hoe, casually as if he were scribing out the foundation for a new corn crib. "I'd say 'bout right there'd be all right" he might have said, as he envisioned his final resting place. I imagined the particular spot was a place of pleasant memories-- a picnic spot in the warm late morning sun, perhaps or later in the afternoon, a cool and shady place to stretch out in the grass and rest from his work in the narrow pastures along Goose Creek. And right then, his young wife also knew her place next to him behind the house they had built on this rough land. They had carved the clearing out of forest with two mules in the mud, in the snow. And from here they would never leave.