Western New York is a cemetery.
From bones, histories, and secrets, to streams and rivers, to hundreds of thousands of pounds of chemical waste, our landscape is littered with fill dirt and burial mounds. A short drive down any of the region’s interstates reveals this — ominous mounds of sod loom over every limited-access highway, and nearly every major expressway cuts through a cemetery.
How do we cope with this knowledge, this fear than beneath our feet there may be a looming ghost, stream, or disaster? How do we learn to recognize, how do we memorialize, and how do we learn from the mistakes and victories of our elders?
My suggestion: go outside. Walk and look around. Put your ear to the earth and listen. Learn a bit about history and architecture and nature and sound, and these buried things won’t rattle their bones at you anymore. Or at least you’ll know what bumps in the night, know the hidden network of tunnels and dens that lies under your home.
And if my work can help with this, all the better.