By On Sunday, Dave and Elebrown and I visited several cemeteries near Woodbine.
Harrison Messing, only three years old at the time of his death.
You wonder the cause, the circumstances, and whether or not he had siblings. A cemetery offers incomplete stories.
Even if a child has been dead for 100 years, you can’t help but feel the immense sadness yourself when standing at the grave of a youngster.
There’s an aura of despair around the tombstones of children that lingers through the centuries – a pain that the mighty Kansas wind cannot disperse.
Here’s Uedith Langhofer. July 17, 1908 – Sept. 28, 1914. A little 6-year-old, “Our Angle.” No, we don’t count off for spelling. And… thinking of ‘our little angle’ does kind of turn up the corners of my mouth.
While most gravestones are made of granite, this one is limestone.
There’s something that really grabs the heart seeing that stone for their little “angle.” It’s poignant, moving.
Janet
Don’t you think the stone for little Harrison Messing looks fairly new for 1894? I wondered why there were pipes around the grave? –and what are those little green things on the corners?
Actually, I was just going to show Dave and Cheryl where “Shady Brook” was and then I thought that I should show them that strange gravesite with the hanging basket, so then it turned into a “cemetery tour,” because, of course, I then had to show them “our little angle.” Then, after Shady Brook (which always seems funny because there’s NOTHING there, but it’s been on the map a long time; people give directions: ‘turn east at Shady Brook’ and at least one weatherman warned that a tornado was near shady Brook), we had to see the Shady Brook church and the “break-away Lutheran cemetery,” and driving down that road, I remembered the little cemetery north of our old farm. It used to have cedar trees all around it and it was a neat and spooky place to be back in my old childhood days. (I hope you found your cell phone, Dave?)
yeah, Harrison has a newish stone which seemed kinda weird to me. (It’s hard to type with a happy-to-be-home cat in my face!)
Yes, Dave found his cell phone – in White City.
I can’t remember where, but I think my sister Janie wrote that the German word for “angel” is “angle.” I know we talked about that, but I thought we weren’t really sure……now, you’d think, with so many German folk in and around Woodbine, that we could just ASK someone, but even my mother didn’t know. I should have asked Brigitte!! I did look up “angel” on the net and the name for “angel” is “engel!” (we used to live next door to the “Engels”–I didn’t know they were really “angels!”) I did find that “Oesterreich” is really an Austrian-German name, but then there’s Russian-German and a whole slew of German dialects, so, who knows? We used to have an intern at St. Mark’s who was from Germany. I’m going to have to ask him!