I'm Still Here, Sergeant Floyd

The week's theme for Flickr Urban Sketchers group Feb 13 to 19, 2011, was cemeteries and graveyards.  Every week the theme changes. If  you want to focus on the chosen theme during sketching, you're invited to sketch along with others around the world.  People who care, toss ideas into the "idea jar" and the group's moderator decides on the final focus.  Off we go, then to our 'assignment'.  When finished sketching, if you want to, you can post to the discussion page at Flickr Urban Sketchers, or if you'd like, you can upload your drawing to the 'pool', if you've joined as a member (at Google and Flickr).

Yesterday, a map in the Sioux City phone book gave me the general area of a cemetery on Floyd street, off of 6th Ave.  Off I went. I made a wrong turn on 6th and ended up at Palmer's Candies (another story - another time).  Turning the opposite direction, I finally arrived, in the center of a residential area at a hilly place of rest, on 7th street, among the markers of life's last challenge - Floyd Cemetery.

No other living human being was there at the moment.  Sunny shadows accented jutting shapes, distinct statements in stone and granite poked up from a long cold yellow winter lawn.  The grasses frozen in matty swirls displayed tiny bits of snowdrifts that had melted, reshaped themselves, flattened and froze again bubbly clear at many of the gravestone bases.  Names of Sioux City residents collectively stand here like a stone choir on the hills, marking family and individuals in the city's past, now sleeping under the name of The Floyd Cemetery. {Floyd is known as a member of Lewis and Clark's party. Sergeant Charles Floyd died on the banks of the Missouri river at Sioux City of "bilous chilous" (probably appendicitis), in 1804, a few years later Sioux City made dedication of his memorial 1901.}

I spent an hour drawing. It was very quiet. I did as much thinking as I did drawing. On leaving, I sensed people of every age, shape and persuasion, who'd placed a family member's body in the ground, under the lawn, on one of these hills.  I sensed how many tears over the collection of years must have been cried in this one place, and then multiplied that thought by all the cemeteries or other burial places through time over the world,of that same occurrence. I again knew, on this sunny day, that most of us will end in a place such as Floyd's; families or city workers will do what they can about our instructions on what to do with our body when we no longer live in it.  Some of us still have homework to do, don't we?

I've drawn in pencil on white paper, the headstones of Westcott and of Poor, because they were distinct in shape and shadow that day, not because I am related to those people. They are shown on the Flickr theme of the week page in the Urban Sketcher's group discussion, and on my own flickr page, I call, DRAWUSNOW. (if you search - look in "people"  for that name, drawia, or Toni Wheat).

In a small sketchy kind of way (Webster's definition "resembling a sketch";  not an URBAN dictionary definition), I do feel a bit connected to the Westcotts and the Poors.  On my way out, back to the life of the city, I checked the book at the entrance hillside.  I'm not in the book yet... whew... (see links below) or take a look on the left at the thumbnail sketches.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/drawia/5458626573