the intruder

When I was five, we left Brooklyn and moved to a farm in upstate New York. There were no neighbors for miles, just land. A great forest was dotted with rusting cars. Along the road there were little cemeteries, older than old, often with no names on the stones, many of them face down in the grass. From the civil war or earlier., they littered the countryside shaded by old maples, sitting behind wooden fences as the summer grass grew tall and hid them, as snow drifted in great hills and they vanished for a few months. I imagined the families that were buried there, this blank stone a father, the next one with a crack running through it was a mother – his wife, an uncle, a cousin, an orphan, a runaway.

Later in life, I found myself taking pictures in cemeteries everywhere I travelled, in Rome, in Tbilisi, in Moscow. And then I felt like it was terribly wrong to do this, a trespass I should undo. Yes, they are fascinating places – the names, the remembrances left behind, a bouquet of wildflowers, a bottle, a glass. But maybe better to leave them alone, to respect their privacy. Maybe better to just stand in the dust with my eyes down as people pass, knowing the path, knowing the way to go to their loved one, Me the unexpected guest, the intruder, the foreigner.