Please Stand By...

Farm to Market Road 3078

It seems all I can do these days is reminisce and dream of road trips and camping days of long ago. Well, not too long ago but in these work days and winter doldrums, it just seems long ago. The days here in West Texas are warm and sunny and very inviting for traveling and camping. The nights are very cold but it often warms up quickly. The wind, she blows, and will really be gearing up soon as she always does for a windy spring which usually dies down sometime around late June.

Today, I reflect back on a happy trip through Balmorhea, Texas, in which I overnighted a couple nights at the state park. In the late evenings, I always enjoy a hour long bike ride into the Chihuahuan desert west of the state park on Farm to Market Road 3078. Not many people take this two lane highway because they are in a hurry and stay on the Interstate. I am glad because it gives me the peaceful highway all to myself.

Eventually, I came upon what seems like an abandoned church but I do not think that it is empty.

Here, I encounter the nice little store near the state park that sells odds and ends for the visitors to the state park. Very nice inside and the owners are very nice, too.

The century plant blooms in majesty here in the desert. It will soon give up its life so that young ones may take root and start their long journey to rise and bloom.

The Artwork of Grief

As I was reading Find an Outlet's blog recently, I remembered a country cemetery near here that reminded much of what Debra's article was saying. So, with camera in hand, I headed off to see what this resting place could offer to me on a cold, windy and dreary day.

Ben Ficklin Cemetery is on top of a lonely hill that once over looked the river that washed away the little community of Ben Ficklin long ago. The flood was so severe that not only did it destroy the community and its inhabitants, it also destroyed the cemetery and caused graves to open up and float downstream. The community was never rebuilt but the citizens did create a new cemetery on this hill in the hopes it will never be washed away again.

Floods may not erase these graves but time certainly will as I saw this afternoon. Most of the graves are unmarked except for the broken rocks and monuments that are hanging on for as long as it can.

 Some of the graves a have large rock walls and gates surrounding plots of the deceased. I don't know if it was to protect the graves or serve as a kind of monument but they were built with great care and great labor.

 A family rests together in eternity.

 Rusty old gates still protect and preserve a forgotten soul.

 The oldest grave I saw today was dated as a burial in 1907.

 Many of the headstones and markers had been destroyed I guess by vandals but caretakers had pieced them together as best they could. A caretaker group still monitors and cleans up this cemetery.

 Over the decades and through the previous century, these graves have seen much take place from its lonely hilltop. What was once quiet prairie and river country, now is a bustling community of over 100,000 living souls. Noisy highways and bridges have replaced the solitude and busy people pass by these markers by the thousands every. The travelers are too busy to notice these stones or the stories they tell on their fading markers. And I guess that is the way it is even with modern cemetery's. Life goes on...

 Above, the most recent of internments.

 Some of the graves above had these concrete monuments for the family members buried here.

I guess it is not an entertaining way to spend a Sunday afternoon but sometimes I think coming face to face with reality is often very healthy. A little unsettling but still healthy for the soul...