At Rest

First, a quick apology for not having posted in the past several days. I don't really have much excuse, except being tired and mildly busy. Also, this snow and cold weather and the early dark have a kind of depressive effect on me, so that when I get home all I want to do is laze around with a book and a cup of coffee!When we drive, we almost always look for the blue highways. (An aside: that's a great book, by the way, Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. It's a memoir of his travels around the country by back roads...the so-called "blue highways" on the map.) I always like the blue highways on trips. What the heck do you get to see from the interstate? Nothing but median and billboards. When you're driving on a regular road, you have the chance of seeing something like a sign that says "Pet Cemetery" with an arrow. And you can choose to turn down that road on a lark, just to see what you find.

I'm almost always one to take the turn down the side street and see what we find. On the way home from the toy museum, we came upon a huge pet cemetery. Seriously, this place had more acreage than a lot of the human cemeteries we've stopped to visit. The graves we found were no less touching or sentimental than anything you'd find in a regular cemetery.The cemetery has been open since 1919, but we didn't find any graves older than the 1960s or so. Unfortunately, the place was positively swampy from the rain, which made exploring kind of difficult.

I managed to get some shots from the paths, though.

Most of the graves had pictures of the pets, which was very sweet.

I did happen to see a couple of living animals while we were there...several white tailed deer came out of the woods to munch some grass.

And lastly, speaking of animal pictures, here's Liam's 2nd grade school photo. Isn't he the funniest ham you've ever seen?