lifebeyondexaggeration

The house I grew up in has a church across the street. Behind the church is a cemetery, which was the only place the Sunday school kids had to play. One year when I was little, the church decided that the kids needed a proper playground. The clear solution was to pull up the first few rows of headstones to put in a swing set. So, the church committee stacked the first three rows of headstones by a tree off to the corner of the graveyard and bought a nice, shiny, new swing set.

My mother found out about this and nearly pooped herself. Never mind disrespecting the dead. There were much more practical difficulties. My mother who has a master’s in archeology had to explain to the committee that even though the graves were more than a hundred years old, if they dug down six feet to anchor the swings, they would find feet.

Bones don’t just disappear in a hundred years. They would still be down there. And the church would run the risk of becoming the setting for Poltergeist 4. The committee returned the swing set, but no one had ever bothered to document which order the headstones used to be in. So they never put them back. To this day there is a moss and vine covered stack of headstones in the corner of the graveyard, and I refuse to go back there after dark.

Oh! And I wanted to announce that my author website is up and running. Please head over to http://meganorussell.com to check it out!