We spent this past weekend in West Seattle with our very close friends Brian and Alexa (the newlyweds who just bought a house!), so on the drive home this afternoon we mapped out our detour to Tower Road Cemetary in Cowlitz County. It rained on us for awhile, but as we neared our destination the downpour lessened and we found ourselves driving for a few miles off of the main highway down winding country roads. We pressed our noses to the window and squinted out the wet windshield to find what we were sure would be an extremely small graveyard. We were not wrong. I worried that seeing my brother's name on a grave would completely freak me out, and was comforted by the thought that according to the website we'd found, the dates on the grave would be blank. Of course, a grave with a name and no dates isn't exactly reassuring. We joked that it was the stuff of ghoulish short stories, episodes of The Twilight Zone, and urban legends told at slumber parties in between sessions of "light as a feather, stiff as a board."
While we were driving, Andy and I had been speculating about what we would find when we got there. Locked gates with "Private Property" written on them? Those little plastic cups that hold fake flowers? Actual mourners? We were both expecting something akin to that old graveyard at Disneyland's "Haunted Mansion" ride, with big crumbling upright headstones covered in ivy. It was a combination of all that, save for the mourners. We actually drove right past it at first because the sign was so old that the painted lettering had completely faded. We backtracked to a tiny field flanked by farms and surrounded by a chain-link fence that thankfully had an open gate and a small shoulder where we could park the car. There was no parking lot, and the nearest cross street was a gravel lane with a forbidding sign reading "Private Road--Do Not Enter." Andy jumped out of the car with camera in hand while I waited with Alton in his car seat. Drizzle continued to fall around us on the misty, evergreen-lined hillsides, giving our errand an even more eerie feel. The cemetery was probably only about 1,000 square feet, with both old and new graves, some with the brightly-colored fake flowers. Andy strode through the damp grass, paused and looked like he was scraping at something with his shoe. Success!
When he returned with pictures I saw that the grave had dates after all, but wasn't nearly as creepy as I'd imagined it would be. The stone was flat to the ground, shiny marble, and only ten years old. This Keith was an old man who was apparently married to a woman named Alma. This was just a cool brush with someone who must be a very distant relative somewhere far back in the family tree, and not a blog posting that ends with "...but when she called her brother that afternoon, a strange woman answered and said that no one by that name had ever existed: she didn't have a brother at all!"
Oh, and for those who do not know (most of you), the title of this post comes from a funny family story. When K.C. was a child we were recounting some event that had happened before he was born, and so K.C. verified with Mom: "Was I dead then?" Because obviously if it happened before you were alive, you must have been...dead!
Prior to all these shenanigans, we spent a very fun weekend with Alexa and Brian in their new home. It's a cozy place built in the 1930s with a lofted master suite, two bedrooms on the main floor, and a finished basement that they've turned into a gorgeous and relaxing den. Our housewarming present to them was manual labor, so Andy and Brian sawed, sanded, painted, drilled, etc., while Alexa and I shopped for fabric for the curtains I am sewing for them. Alton was ENTHRALLED by their two cats, and we had a couple of near "first steps" moments when he would spot them from across the room and lunge forward determined to try to catch them. Below are pictures of their view from the dining room and Alton messing around. I decided to try for some artsy-fartsy shots of him in their front living room, a beautiful mix of contemporary-meets-classic decor, and I really like how they turned out. Enjoy!
And finally, during the last short leg of our drive home Alton started getting fussy, so we turned on some music. The song was from a kid's sing-along CD and Andy and I started belting "On the Road Again" at the top of our lungs in a bid to soothe the baby. We looked back at the car seat and this was the look Alton was giving us: a mixture of confusion, condescension, and just plain old "what the heck?!"
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