Eight years ago I drove to Minnesota to spend a couple of weeks in an artist residency on the St. Croix River. (I posted some pictures from that time, as well as a story I wrote for the host organization, here.) On my way there I stopped in the town of Owatonna, where my mother spent her childhood and where her parents are buried. We visited their grave in 1978, when my mother came to Wisconsin to visit me while I was studying at the UW–Madison.
On my drive to the hosting research station, I passed by Owatonna. Why not stop again to say hello? I thought. My grandmother, Annie Hooten Skinner, after all, was the only grandparent I had actually known. It would be good to pay my respecrs. But more so, I could stop for my mother, who herself had died just a few months earlier.
On my drive to the hosting research station, I passed by Owatonna. Why not stop again to say hello? I thought. My grandmother, Annie Hooten Skinner, after all, was the only grandparent I had actually known. It would be good to pay my respecrs. But more so, I could stop for my mother, who herself had died just a few months earlier.
When I asked at a gas station for the town cemetery, the fellow asked, "Which one?" I said I didn't know, but I sort of remembered hills. He pointed me to the north of town, said it was probably (I'm guessing now, based on a Google maps search) Saint John's Cemetery, run by the Lutherans. My grandparents were Protestants. That could be right.
I drove up a hill and found the graves laid out not in neat rows, but grouped and clustered, lots of different headstones and monuments, as if in conversation. Absolutely nothing looked familiar. I drove to various sections of the cemetery. Still nothing. About to give up, I decided to give it one last spin. At a bend in the road, something struck me. I parked and got out. And sure enough: there was the Skinner family stone, on the very edge of the plantable property, overlooking a forested glen. I thought it ironically fitting that even in death my family would be on the fringes.
Here's a mosaic I made of my grandparents' graves. I was surprised to see the infants' headstones: I'm not sure I knew about lost children. (Well, I must have, since I'd visited the grave once before. But obviously I forgot.) It makes sense, though: my mother was adopted because her parents thought they couldn't have children of their own. I had just assumed they couldn't conceive. But it was sadder than that.
I wonder if I'll be the last person to visit that gravesite deliberately. It's entirely possible . . .
1 comment:
Fringes, possibly, but I liked the part that their graves overlook a forested glen. Sounds fitting.
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