The Cemetery on King Street

On King Street in Hertford, behind the high school, is the cemetery. This is a very old cemetery. It has a pump station in the center, which I suspect is being used to help keep the swampy ground dry and prevent the stones from falling, and the graves from sinking.

It’s not a huge, ostentatious place, but it is full of a sense of history. You’ll see from the included photo that the White Family (the same White family, I believe, who built our house, though what branch of it I have no idea) has been burying their dead in this same graveyard, side by side, for literally centuries.



Another family planted a small dogwood in a stone rectangle plot many years ago. That Dogwood is very large now, flowering brilliantly, and its roots bind the graves of the family almost certainly, having grown outward from the center of that plot to embrace them all. It is beautiful.

The Cemetery in Hertford isn’t laid out in any geometric pattern you can discern, and the markers and monuments are as varied, no doubt, as those whose memories are contained within them. Families are buried there, not individuals. Not just Dogwoods put down roots, it seems.

On our way out of the cemetery, we happened upon one of the Hertford Turtles – a very small one. I knew the weather would turn bad last night, so we brought him home, and he now resides in a turtle bowl in our kitchen. Life, from a place dedicated to the remembrance of other lives….

His name is Tom.

DNW

THE HERTFORD TURTLES...

On the winding road into town, which is very reminiscent of the road on the Andy Griffith show where Andy and Opy skip stones at the beginning of the show, there is a lot to see. There are almost always Canadian Geese and ducks, sometimes walking across the road and holding up traffic. Now and then a deer crosses - or ten - all at once. There are snakes (Billy and I even found one on the bridge one day, where it had no business being). The most remarkable thing, though is a nondescript log sticking up at an angle away from the road.

Local legend (wholly unsubstantiated as far as I can tell) says that a pirate ship, trying to take a tributary off te Perquimans River, sank there, and the log is the broken off tip of the mast. I don't know what it is, but as long as we've been in town, it's been there. The thing about it is, it is always inhabited. Our town is guarded by sentinel turtles. They crawl up on the log, sometimes one, sometimes as many as four, the rear turtles crawling up on to the shells of those in front.

They stare out over the water toward the river, as if they are watching for something. Unless weather doesn't permit it, they are always there...and down the road is a flat log where smaller turtles seem to be in training...lined up as many as a dozen at a time...so that there will always be a guardian on the log.

I don't know what they are guarding us from, but being an author, worlds of possibility open up. I'm not sure how they'd warn us when the time comes, but every time I drive in over that bridge and see them there, noses to the river, I feel safer somehow. Here is a photo of two of our guardians...