We drove past Prairie Point Cemetery yesterday afternoon. Four generations of my mother’s family and two generations of my father’s family are all buried there. My Mom picked out a plot for her and Dad where you could stand and see the site of the farmhouse where she was born and grew up. She said that in those days the cemetery was full of wildflowers and vines. She remembers playing there as a child and sitting out on their big front porch in the spring and smelling the sweet nectar of the flowers on the breeze. The only way to the house was down a rutted dirt road barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass. The flowers are not there anymore and neither is the house. The people who maintain the cemetery now want easy maintenance, not a bunch of messy flowers. Something they can just mow down every couple weeks. The big old oak trees are still there though. The house got sold to someone who dismantled it and moved it away. My grandparents moved to ‘town’ – town being a place that even today only has 1700 inhabitants. Later the land went too. You couldn’t support a family on it. They moved away and got jobs in the big city working in factories or as schoolteachers.

My grandmother continued to live ‘in town’ until she died in the early sixties. There are three things that I especially remember about her. She loved cats and I guess I inherited that from her because all my adult life I’ve had at least one cat. The second thing is that her yard was an enormous flowerbed and maybe I inherited a little of that too. As I have got older I find that I like to putter around in the yard too. Another thing is that she was a quilter. Her front parlor had a big rectangular frame suspended from the ceiling on chains. She would fasten a quilt on the frame and lower it down until it was about three feet above the floor. Then she could just pull up a chair to whatever spot she needed to work on. I still have some of those quilts she made. My mother learned quilting from her and now my wife and my sister have both taken it up too. You can see some of their work here.

Prairie Point is where I come from, so I’ve decided to choose it for the title of this little experiment. This journal is probably just going to be a bunch of random thoughts. I work in the IT area, but very little that I write about is likely to be IT related. I get enough of that at the office. Besides I know enough about IT to realize you would be better off getting your information somewhere else. I expect that most of my posts will be on topics that I know little or nothing about. I’ve found that the less you know about something the easier it is to write about it. I don’t expect to post a lot. I’ve got too many other things to do.