Place Entry #1: Today in the Cemetery: Day 1

     It is Wednesday the 19^th of January. I am walking in Pittsburgh’s Homewood Cemetery for the first time. When trying to experience a “place” for the first time it is natural to be overly aware of  your senses, and I am.

               

    My mind focuses on the feeling of my feet landing with every step on the cold pavement of road. The discomfort and growing cold that clings to my toes as I clinch them into small fists in-between strides, wanting to feel the blood actually travel from the throb of my heart down to the literal tips of my toes. This turns into a game of speed and coordination that I play with myself.

                

    Continuing to walk, I think that I hear birds singing, but that’s silly, they’ve all flown south right? I stop and listen. The sounds stop. I step again, and the sounds rise. I stop and they (the sounds), again stop. I think of the blues, and the technique of “call and response”. People often allude to the music or orchestration of the natural world. I smile and keep walking, thinking of my stroll as an improvisational riff that nature and I are in. Thinking of scatting, and Louis Armstrong, the smooth, gravel, slide, and “coolness” of his musical quality.

               

  In the cemetery there is not too much to taste, I think. But I stop my walking and bite at the air, inhaling with my mouth wide open. I do taste the cemetery. There is a gamy quality to this place. This is understandable since the term “game” in an animal sense simply means- an animal not normally domesticated. The cemetery may be the least domesticated place for animals to be. What human provision or control really is there in a cemetery? Everyone here for any majority of the time is dead. So I will describe the cemetery’s taste as… gamy.

                

    What I see are sloping hills (sot surprising for an area where the word “hill” is its name). The inclines look spotted. The gravestones and occasional oblong-esque patches of brown roots and dead grass blot the snow. The snow is trying so desperately to cover the ground and reminds me of a Dalmatian, but dogs are not allowed in the Homewood Cemetery.

                 

   Now I am left to my nose. What do I smell: in movies, when a character is in a place of “death”, or around dead bodies they can identify “the smell” of death? I do not smell “death” in a literal sense of decaying bodies (however the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “That Smell” is stuck in my head), or do I? When initially asking myself this, I automatically thought about a “human” death. What about the world around me? I breathe in not considering the tombstones and the human shells under the soil. I do smell death, the somewhat smoky and damp smell that permeates through the mixing of dirt, fallen leaves, and slowly melting snow. I hold a piece of the tar like substance to my nose and swallow the smell of the compost. I think of sawdust, imagine I am in a woodshop, and wonder what we are carving?

               

   I sense that I am going to grow to really enjoy this place. Thanks for reading and I will see you tomorrow, in the cemetery.