I drove into Pulaski Tennessee on Friday to do a little shopping and drop off the boat payment at the post office. Because I rarely travel there, I ended up taking a wrong turn and found myself in a portion of town that was in slow motion decay. It was a mix of 60 or 70 year old cheaply built homes with clapboard siding interspersed with a type of light industry that lent itself to gravel parking lots and rusting, outdated, equipment waiting to be reacquired by nature.
The homes were badly rundown. Here and there you could see where folk were battling back against the unrelenting decay, but their cause is lost even if they were unwilling to concede the battle to time and the elements.
Near the center point of this area there was once a cemetery. Many years ago the city threw in the towel on trying to keep it maintained and turned it into a park of sorts. You could call it a memory garden without the garden. Soon it will be without memories as well. Such is our lot.
It was a cold and gray day that was perfectly lousy for photography and yet the weather, neighborhood, and the gray stone and headstones put me in a mood that I thought could be shared through photo’s, and importantly, I could photograph. I failed, but not miserably so I do have a little to share of what I found.
The photo’s do a poor job of capturing the mood. It was not sadness, not remorse nor even melancholy. It’s that mood that comes when you meld the awareness of the inevitable with recognition of the smallness of our individual lives. Wish I could capture that feel on film.
A parting note. There were many of these (below) throughout the garden. You would expect as much from frontier living in rural Tennessee in the 1800’s. Whenever I see one of these I think of the unspeakable sadness of the parents as they placed the stones. This stone is particular in that, I suppose, the parents spent their last penny on purchasing her marker.
Give a little thought to how you spend your day(s).