Time, time, time

On our neighborhood walks my wife and I used to walk past a big old deciduous tree (as I recall, though it may have been a pine). A couple years back, though, it dropped its biggest branch and some others in a storm, and the property owners had it removed. All of it, stump and all. This year when we walked past that spot, there is absolutely no indication that the tree was ever there. Once the next generation of property owners move in, no one will recall that tree.

It existed, but now it's totally gone.

When we moved into our house more than 20 years back, a semi-retired surgeon and his wife lived across the street. About 8 years ago she fell and died. He lived on until about three years back, and I spent a lot of time talking with him; we became close friends. But he, in his 80s, began to quickly deteriorate, his kids moved him into a nursing home, and he died. The kids sold the house. A new family moved in, by coincidence another doctor, with young kids of the their own. Last year the office complex where my friend had his medical office was torn down. A few years from now no one in the neighborhood will remember my friend across the street, much less where he worked.

He existed, but now he's totally gone.

Time is like that, relentlessly scouring the past away.

In doing my genealogical research, I came across a census record showing the Smith branch of the family in Iowa in 1880, mother, father, five kids, on a farm. They had a newborn baby named Clara. She is absent from the 1890 census though there is no family story of a lost daughter, and she never re-appears in any family records. I did find a 5 year old Clara Smith who drowned in 1885, but she drowned 50 miles from the Smith family farm. I suspect that she is the same one, but will never likely know.

Time is like that,

But some things linger longer than others, of course. Off to one side of Highway 151 in Iowa, near the Amana Colonies, sits a small cemetery fenced in white. It has one nicely-calligraphed tombstone, and several other unmarked graves. The name of the deceased is Mary Wright, who died in the 1880s as a young girl, around the age of 11 (I don't have the precises details at hand at the moment).

But at least there is a story to her grave. The cemetery is the remnant of a larger one that was removed when the railroad came through, though for some reason Mary and the unknowns were left behind. And because of the unique and touching nature of the site, some folks did some pretty detailed research on Mary and her family. According to the research she died of some sort of condition that caused sores all over her body; my wife (a geneticist) says it was likely an autoimmune condition. The story is that until the latter part of the 20th century (at least). Rock Island train crews would stop and maintain the grave. Apparently the surviving family moved on to another farmstead and prospered, while the townsite withered and died. The county eventually took over caring for the grave. There are local stories that on Christmas Eve a blue light hovers over the gravesite.

But at least time has not yet scoured away completely the story of Mary Wright.