Occasional Jots and Tittles

State (and other) geographic borders always intrigue me. Rivers seem the logical choice in many cases, because it’s easy to see where the line is – in the middle of the water. Nonetheless, lots of state borders are straight lines. In the late 1700’s and into the 1800’s, advances in optics and other equipment made it possible to accurately survey long straight lines, which made it possible to draw things like, oh, the Mason-Dixon Line. Not that it kept “them” on their side of it.

Or at least, so we thought. In several places a long line is the border between multiple states, with one line dead-ending into another to bring three states together at one point. But there’s only one spot in the country where two such lines cross, bringing four states together – It’s called Four Corners, at the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. Tourists to the area love to sit in the middle and put one foot or hand in each of the four states. I suspect literally hundreds of thousands of people over the years have done it.

Only problem is, the 1868 survey which drew the lines is off. By about 2.5 miles, actually. Thanks to modern things like GPS and satellites, we can measure these things much more accurately. No word, yet, on whether the Four Corners monument will be moved to the correct location, or whether the states are going to fight out back tax revenues for the property.

So, this morning, I met my parents and my sister at the funeral home where my aunt’s body will be cremated. Her three younger children were all there as well; the funeral home asked if we wanted some private time for the family to see her one last time before the cremation, since the funeral won’t be until Monday.

All in all, this funeral home has done a good job for us in the past, but I had a mild beef with them. Granted, we weren’t having a full-scale wake there, so I didn’t expect a big fuss. Because of the cremation, they didn’t have to buy a casket – so there wasn’t one. I can understand that. But the funeral home had laid out the body on a hospital-type gurney, with nothing draped over it to cover the chrome metal legs or the wheels or anything. And her body was just covered by a plain white hospital-type sheet. If it weren’t for the fact that the private viewing was held in one of the “parlors” in the funeral home, I’d have thought we were in a morgue.

Granted, my aunt was a simple woman who liked simple things. She wanted the cremation and she wanted no big fuss. But I honestly think the funeral home could invest in a simple black tailored drape to put over the stretcher for situations like this.

Afterwards, my parents and I went out to check on my mothers’ parents tombs and her other siblings’ graves nearby. All were in good condition although (naturally) flowers had been swiped from one of the graves. My aunt’s ashes will be buried in the grave with one of her nieces, who’s also in this group. My parents and I have graves across the cemetery.

You’d think, with a family like mine, we’d have a family vault or a big family plot somewhere. And we do. One of each, in fact. But the vault is across the river and down about 20 miles, where my great-grandfather was the last to be buried; after his death, the family picked up and moved to Baton Rouge, where they purchased a large family plot. Buried there are my great-grandmother and five of her 11 children. But the remainder of the plot is empty, due to a dispute between some of those children (when still alive) and my grandfather, their brother-in-law, as to the ownership. He and his oldest sister-in-law had pooled resources in 1945 to buy the plot, when Great-grandma died, so that there would be ample room for all the unmarried sisters as well as his wife (their sister) and their kids. Naturally, of course, the transaction was only recorded in my great-aunt’s name, and after her death, the sisters insisted that the plots all belonged to her.

My grandfather basically said, using far more polite language, “Fuck you” and bought their tombs in another cemetery. So to this day, the remainder of our family plot in the old cemetery here sits unused. No living member of the family really wants to be buried there. So I’ve suggested a solution dripping with poetic justice; the old aunts buried there were dear family, but also typical for their era – racial and ethnic bigots from day one, where no person of color could enter through their front door. The gravesites are now owned by my mother and some of her cousins, nieces and nephews as inherited property, so I suggest they donate them to the church for the burial of indigent black people, leaving them side-by-side for eternal rest. The churning should produce enough power to light a small city.