The monuments of the dead are their gravestones in the little cemeteries along the roads. The monuments of the old way of life here are the abandoned stores, buildings, and machinery that are visible everywhere in our landscape. It is hard for me now to drive anywhere in the county and not see the dozens of decaying buildings, old sheds, abandoned stores, mechanics shops, ancient houses all around us.
I see these things with neither lament nor remorse. They are present to us as are the graves of the country graveyards. All around us in the midst of new houses and new roads and heavy traffic, the old structures are present: not ghosts for certainly they are real--they are buildings I can still walk in, lean in their shade, listen for the scurrying buzz in the leaves on the floor and catch my breath wondering if it is a mouse or rattler.
Here in Franklin County, the new ways happened quickly, recently--within the living memory of both people and buildings so the old buildings are still all around us. We have not yet had time or cause to revise our history and wipe out from our sight all traces of the past that might remind us of other ways, other times. Weathered men still sit, alone on the porch, warming their hand in the sun. The barns and stores still stand, not as ghosts but as sentinels. Sentinels of memory.
I remember standing once in a pine wood on our farm noticing long diagonal lines, shadows in the late day, that ran through the woods between the pines. Then my father explained, "There was a farm here. They grew corn." Even after 50 years and pines big as my waist, the furrow traces were still there.
The land embodies its own memory. The present shape of the land is the outcome of past use. By learning to see and read the clues built into the land--in the old barns and sheds, in the bends of roads, in the tiling of stones to make a fence, in the pattern of fencerows, in the long diagonal shadows in the pine woods, the land saves its story in its flesh. All archaeological ecology is an act of remembering, of finding and seeing and putting together again the pieces, the members, of a past life that is re-membered, that lives again in our reading of the text the hidden narrative of the fabric of the land itself.
Bud Sutherland had told me once how to find his family's old home place in the cove: "Go in the springtime. Just look for the daffodils." After a hundred years or more a slash of yellow in the open woods of late winter brings me to the place. Near the flowers two stones mark a corner; nothing more survives. Later, I would learn also to look for apple blossoms out of place in the woods. The old people planted daffodils by the fence, and an apple tree in the dooryard. Go in the springtime. Just look for apple blossoms.