Amanda waxes......

I really like to visit cemeteries. History, shade, quiet and creepiness all in once place.

I'm always amazed at the older headstones, done by a person with a hammer and chisel. There's an entire symbolism to the figures also. Weeping willows, angels, lambs, certain types of flowers all have their own meaning in the Christian religion. Christians are buried with their feet pointing east, so that when judgement day comes they will be facing the correct direction. Persons who were suicides, criminals or crazy were buried facing a different direction.

I tend to have really deep thoughts about the generations of women who came before me. Specifically those who helped settle a region. The other day I took a walking tour of Oakwood Cemetery here in Austin.

There are women buried there who came to Austin prior to the Civil War. I really ponder what they went through to bring us to the present day.

Women who traveled to the west in wagons that made twenty miles a day. Women with rags between their legs or babies in their wombs. Giving birth in wagons, in tents, in the open. Helping build the houses they would live in. One room with a fireplace and an outhouse. No insulation, glass windows or climate control. Coming to Texas in the heat and humidity wearing long skirts. They cooked over fires, did laundry by hand, preserved their foods as best they could.

I'm quite certain I can not even begin to understand the amount of hard work and heartache these women went through for the reward of taming twelve acres. The reward of feeding themselves. The reward of keeping everyone alive.

Just the health risks cause me to shudder. Dipthiria, scarlet fever, smallpox, flu, infections, bee sting allergies, accidents all took their husbands and their children and themselves. Loved ones who were buried out on the prairies with no markers to indicate they even lived. Complications from childbirth or pregnancy must have overcome so many of them.

Women we'll never know the names of, but who paved the way for us just the same. The women who started churches and schools and carved out communities in order to bring civility to such a wild place. A place that wasn't even a state.

I wander around and look at the carved rocks telling me they lived, that they were here. Every one of them had a life. They were someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's daughter. They loved and cried and laughed. Entire lives buried under these slabs of granite, secrets I'll never know about how they endured, even enjoyed the life they made for themselves here in the wild Texas hill country.

Every one of them worthy of a biography. Every one of them worthy of my inadequate 'thank you'.