Happy Valentines Day

A Valentine Horoscope

CANCER (June 21 - July 22)
Your love story has elements of a farce mixed with a soap opera, fairy tale, and ghost story. For a normal human being, it might be too intense and convoluted to deal with; it requires so much willing suspension of disbelief and involves so much letting go of certainty that no one in their right mind would agree to its demands. Luckily, you're not a normal human being these days, and you're not particularly in your right mind. That's why I say unto you: Ride this snaky tale for all it's worth. Enjoy every plot twist and riddle as if you've been given an epic myth you can ponder and learn from for the next ten years. Happy Valentine Daze, Cancerian!

the Daniels Family

When tromping in Oak Hill Cemetery this past Friday, I found this monument inscribed with the letter D for Daniels. I knew the back story from this past year of research on Oak Hill Cemetery, so finding this layout of the family plots made me smile.

Harriette Weare (1829-1919) married Lowell Daniels (1822-1876). When he passed, he was only 54, leaving a widow in her late 40s. Poor Harriette Weare Daniels older brother then died within a few days. Harriette married Lawson Daniels (1827-1906), the younger brother of her deceased husband. They had a long marriage. He passed in 1906 and she memorialized him with a donation to Oak Hill Cemetery of $6600. That was a lot of $$$$ for 1907-08. Local architects Josselyn and Taylor were commissioned to design the new entrance to the cemetery, which included a split-granite boulder gatehouse, a stone wall, a cast iron fence, and an elaborate gate. A plaque set into the stone dedicates this entry to Lawson Daniels. There is no mention of the other brother, her first husband.

What made me smile when I happened upon this family plot? Harriette Weare Daniels is planted in between the two brothers, her late and later husbands.

A Day Among the Memorials to the Dead

Ben Webster / Coleman Hawkins 1957 ~ It Never Entered My Mind

1.11.11 x 11:11

Too much Dong

Half Way Around the World

I just returned from a 2-week adventure to Vietnam to visit my son. Ev is teaching English in Ho Chi Minh City, a.k.a. Saigon for those of us from the Vietnam War era.

Twenty-four + 11 hours after our first plane took off from the Minneapolis airport, I was searching the crowd outside the entry doors of the Saigon airport terminal looking for one 22-year old, Caucasian male. I had just traveled half way around the world to spend the holidays/school break with Ev in his new home off Co Bac Street in District 1 of a city of 9-million people. The journey was long and grueling, but the minute I spotted him standing there with a grin as big as all get-out, I felt refreshed and safe and totally committed to immersing myself in this big adventure in SE Asia.

The details of the trip will undoubtedly bore you, but a few select fotos are worth the blogspace. It was a trip of a lifetime. The sights, the smells, and the experiences opened my eyes to another world. The landscape was extraordinary, the cemeteries colorful, the food delicious, and the people gracious...and humored by our clumsy American ways.

Ev is in a good place. The people on his street love him and call out to him as he passes by. We, too, now know them all. He is teaching 1st graders, 3rd graders, high school freshmen, and college freshmen; he even instructs a class-roomful of oldsters wanting to master the English language.

One thousand fotos of people, food, agriculture, motor scooters, bonsai and topiary, soils, hardscape, architecture, and infrastructure now sit on my external hard drive and after reviewing every one of them, I have still to find that one word to describe my life for two weeks in Vietnam. Maybe a hyphenated word will do for now....life-changing.

Winding Down

Oak Hill Cemetery, 1996 foto of a stand of Bur Oaks and Shagbark Hickories.
in the SE corner. Today these trees are gone.
source: Iowa State Historical Preservation Office

Finals next week. I have one more paper and presentation to prepare and present. This last paper of the semester focuses on one small aspect of my thesis and it has been enlightening in that I have had to accept some hard realities about Oak Hill Cemetery in Cedar Rapids, IA. Does it still possess enough integrity for a listing on the National Register? I am saddened because this close-up look has revealed irreversible changes over the years, the loss of important elements of the original design. It still has the old bones of a Grand Dame, but these are really old bones.

I guess that is my challenge....to build an argument that this cultural landscape is worth recognition as historically significant with the integrity to back up that significance. It not only represents the Midwestern 'lawn' version of a 'rural' cemetery, but it was also a designed landscape of H.W.S. Cleveland, one of the early practitioners of landscape architecture. He envisioned this burial landscape in the context of the Midwest during a period when cemeteries served as parks and green spaces for growing Midwestern towns and cities in the mid-to late-19th century.

Fotos are few and far between. I have scoured the archives of several libraries, several on-line postcard sellers, and put out a call on the OHC's Facebook page. So far nothing. The on-line archival newspapers for the area have been my salvation. Some of these articles dating back to the late 1860s describe in great length some aspect of the cemetery. There were editorials about the felling of the hard maples and elms that lined old Mt. Vernon Road; the re-surfacing of the roads up to and into the cemetery, the new granite gatehouse and trolley stop with its matching cut-boulder fence and iron gate; and the lake that was dug and waiting to be filled within a few days with spring water piped from a hillside between the cemetery and the Cedar River.

These articles are all I have to go on. It was exciting to find them after days of reading and searching. It has been disheartening to realize that so much of this landscape has been altered, or in such disrepair, that someone from Cedar Rapid's past might not recognize this final resting place for their loved ones.

Weather

red skies at morning.....
sailors take warning!