BACK-COUNTRY WOMEN REMEMBERED

Thinking of March and the fact that it would soon be Women's History Month, my thoughts floated to an old hilltop cemetery I was passing along a country road. It was very small and one that meant driving up an incline to a pocket of woods. 

Once there I viewed an undisturbed landscape with a small pond off to the west. A very serene and quiet area. So many of the small cemeteries I visit in the back-country have this quietude that settles within you.

Old gravestones among the weeds. Many of the stones illegible.

My intent was to visit the women who were buried here. To pause a moment to give thanks for their commitment to their families. The gravestones were very historic -- so many of these old stones were weathered with indistinguishable names.

My thoughts were to meditate on the women buried here who worked hard and difficult jobs that were thankless. Let me be frank -- men are almost always the ones who are honored in our history books. Women who grew kitchen gardens, canned,  prepared and served food,  made soap and churned butter, tended children and the sick, milked the cows, wove cotton and wool, made scrap bed-covers,  scoured the dishes, floors and windows with water from streams and wells -- and more --  go unappreciated by most of our historians.  

So I began reading the legible stones for women's names.

Sarah

Here we have Sarah -- her dates tell us she lived until she was seventy-two. A fancy stone compared to  the others that stood nearby. A half circle appears with her name --  its meaning lost.  She might have had a fancier stone than the rest but she was still in the same boat as the other women in the cemetery -- they never had the right to vote.

"Gone Home," reads the epitaph of Sallie E.
( not to scrub floors I hope)

A name illegible from weathering -- hand-carved long ago -- a name and face lost -- perhaps forever. 

Even today I feel that women, for the most part, go unrecognized for their contributions to their families and community. The spoken word is still weighted in favor of men.

But positive change is slowly happening!