May 23, 2022
6 May 2022 | St. Hedwig’s Catholic Church, Thorp, Wisconsin
seen from Malaysia
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6 May 2022 | St. Hedwig’s Catholic Church, Thorp, Wisconsin
11 June 2021 | Union Hill Cemetery, Crawford County, Wi
Arrived at this lovely bench to add the final date and found a riot of mutilated plastic lemons and flowers about the grave. Please take this as a reminder to tell friends or family who may have recently lost a loved one or regularly decorate graves to refrain from purchasing plastic flowers to memorialize the dearly departed. It is the opposite of respect. Consider buying freshly cut flowers from a florist instead, and let them fade and decompose. Please.
18 October 2019 | Farmington Cemetery, La Crosse County, Wisconsin
Breaking the cemetery rules.
In an otherwise plastic free countryside of crops, grazing pastures, and woodlands, some insist on introducing plastic to the landscape because the way we remember our dearly departed is to decorate their graves with plastic flowers.
Sometimes I think about how many shipping containers of plastic flowers are transported over the ocean every year. We worry about greenhouse gas emissions. We worry about micro plastics in the ocean. We are in debt to China. Yet we cannot resist buying more plastic flowers.
Stop and imagine the insanity of manufacturing plastic flowers and shipping them by the container full across the ocean from China to the Un
25 April 2019 | Button Cemetery, Richland County, Wisconsin
Infinitely better than plastic flowers.
23 Sept 2022 | Evergreen Cemetery, Prairie du Chien, Grant County, Wisconsin
Not sure if it will be funny or sad when future intelligence tries to understand why there is an abundance of plastic waste in our burial grounds.
27 June 2022 | Coon Valley Lutheran Cemetery, Vernon County, Wisconsin
Your reminder that the current custom in the United States, and elsewhere, I’m sure, is to honor our dearly departed with bouquets of plastic flowers, manufactured by the tons in China and shipped over the ocean and by rail car at some certainly ridiculous and completely unnecessary expense. Plastic flowers.
The American flags are also manufactured in China. And they’re not cotton. They’re plastic.
When will we stop the madness?
2 Nov 2018 | Season Finale (sort of) Part II
Wrapped up a 3-day work trip to Madison and back at Manning Cemetery, between Readstown and Liberty, Wisconsin, wondering if I was going to create a Part II post to follow up last night’s Part I. Well...notable this: (1) REAL FLOWERS at the monument of Elizabeth Cox, for whom I had to cut a final date. (2) First time I’ve seen one spouse get the full Month-Day-Year treatment while the other gets only Year-to-Year (because she used one of the lines for her gnick name), leaving me in a Sandman’s Choice situation for the dash (because Buford’s dates didn’t have a dash to match). (3) Great time to employ the elegant simplicity of Viroqua Stone Lettering’s trademark diamond dash. (4) And the sunsets...they have been so pretty around driftless Wisconsin the last few days; this one no exception.
31 Oct - 1 Nov 2018 | Season Finale Part I (?)
2nd-to-last stop of the first day of a 3-day working trip to Madison was Valton Cemetery, near Cazenovia, Wisconsin, where (1) the fall clean-up is clearly completed with all plastic flowers packed neatly into waste barrels. What happens next is anyone’s guess. BAN PLASTIC FLOWERS. The day (Halloween) wrapped up at Hillside Cemetery in Cazenovia, where the view is splendid in all directions, especially beyond this magnificent oak, (2) the perfect spooky background for the fresh grave of Evelyn Marshall, R.I.P. Tidying up the hotel room before leaving in the morning made me pause to take (3) a self portrait of sorts...this is what I’ve become. I know what I like, and I like what I know. Always a treat to work on old markers of simple and elegant style, and even better when the year of death is 102 years after the year is birth. (4) R.I.P. Elizabeth Skowland. It’s all good when you get to start the first day of November (5) working among the rustling leaves under the skeletal canopy of tall oaks in Forest Hill Cemetery, in Madison, Wisconsin.
Stop and imagine the insanity of manufacturing plastic flowers and shipping them by the container full across the ocean from China to the Un