Leland Cypress, Rest In Peace

Nice View.

I come from a small town. Very small. All small towns have the obligatory small town cemetery.  At the top of a hill. (Somehow cemeteries end up with the nicest views.) Our small town cemetery, affectionately known as 'boot hill', is at the top of a steep hill where it is always dusty. Even in the rain. Always dusty. Windy too. The road is narrow and the hill is so steep I prefer to walk as I'm convinced I'll accidentally roll my car all the way to the bottom.

All the local families have plots. All of them. At nearly every funeral we go to, and we go to a lot of funerals, someone talks about where they want to be buried. It's totally morbid. They confirm where they'll fit. And as there is no official undertaker or plot map, it's up to us, the younger generation to remember where they are to be put in the end. As we'll likely be the ones digging, we are pretty well versed in the area, the plots, the space needed.

So, you can imagine that when a mysterious headstone appeared a couple weeks ago, at the end of the Roberts row, there was quite a small town commotion.

No one had called. Usually when a funeral home does some work up there, they call my mom as she's pretty in the know. More than not calling, it was an unrecognized name. No one had ever heard of Leland Cypress.

RIP, Leland.

There are sadly, a number of baby graves up there. If you were born 120 years ago out in the middle of nowhere, it wasn't a guarantee that you'd make it. Maybe this is a new marker for some old baby grave?

There was conversation amongst people in town. Who is the Cypress family? No one had ever heard of them. Although, there were always railroad workers with families passing through back in the day. If it was a baby grave marker that some family member had brought in it's possible that no one really ever knew Leland or his family. Which is terribly sad, isn't it?

Some grave, somewhere. No family, no anything.

So odd at the placement, as it was in the Roberts family plot. They didn't know of any relatives named Cypress. No distant cousins or anything that they could recall.

After weeks of conversation and questions no one really had any answers.

Just another lonely grave in a lonely old small town cemetery.

Except its not a headstone.

It's a tree identifier.

Leland Cypress. Is a tree.