Some of us, of literary bent, can’t walk past the South End Burying Ground — the cemetery, that is, by Town Pond, the one with the weeping willows — without being reminded of the famous closing lines of James Joyce’s short story The Dead:
Yes, the newspapers were right: Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Snow is rarely general over the South Fork these days. But when it does fall, that is the moment to walk — softly, softly — down the lanes of the village, hushed, for once, by weather, and think your quiet thoughts.
The oldest tombstone in the burying ground is that of the village’s first pastor, the Rev. Thomas James (1620-1698). The oldest inhabitant, if we can put it that way, is Lion Gardiner (1599-1663), although his original headstone doesn’t survive and it’s his rather grand Gothic-gabled tomb you see to the left of the bare tree. An editor’s great-grandparent claimed to have seen Lion’s remains when the sarcophagus was constructed and the body re-interred in 1888; his hair was said to be red, but we aren’t so sure that wasn’t just the iron in the soil.
The pond, the graveyard, the green. This is the busiest crossroads for modern automotive traffic and it’s at the most ancient intersection of our cultural imagination. The South End Burying Ground is at our very heart. Here the colonists’ settlement rose in 1648. Here lie the bones of many so-called “old families.” It sleeps, softly, softly, as the world flows and changes around it. Time passes, love remains.