we can only hope that I'll be frozen

I'm sitting at my dining roomtable in the damp light of my garden. I should say that I moved my original dining room table outside and replaced it with a much nicer one of solid wood that could hold all my weight and then some. So now here I am, sitting in my garden, at my lesser of two tables. Everything outside has exploded with the rain and heat and my inattention. I have more basil than ever. My tomatoes are tangled in my sunflowers. I have a little fiddler fern I stole and I thought killed from Isaac's farm spouting again in the mossy top of a crumbling clay pot.

I know I haven't written in too long. I've felt calm, mostly composed, if a bit out to lunch. I haven't been sleeping very well or very much lately. Today I was a productivity monster, cleaning most of the house, my body twice, every laundry, and the garden and patio while still having time for a lot of exercise, cooking, and some gallivanting.

I had occasion to google Thornrose Cemetery, a extravagantly beautiful antebellum graveyard about a block from my house. I like to run it, but aside from the perimeter, I don't know the mileage of the interior paths, so I thought I might find out and incorporate it into my route. There's this big grassy hill in the center of it that I often deviate to run beside because of these lovely, giant beech trees that grow there, about three-of-me wide.

Anyway, there's a monument to the Confederate dead up on the hill. I always notice it. There aren't markers, or graves, so I always assumed it was a sort of general memorial. A few times I've wandered up to read the inscription or sprawl out on the cut grass. My googling, however, produced a horrifying fact: my friendly little beech-tree hill is actually a mass grave, a mound filled out with the bodies of over 2,000 soldiers from the Valley battlefields.

I grew up in Manassas; I've always had a bit of a Civil War thing. I try to explain this sometimes to people and usually I sound like a moron. It was just so real to me there growing up, finding bullets playing in my backyard or hearing about how the Bull Run river, where I'd wade and catch crawfish, had once turned red, clogged with bodies. It's always felt personal: always present, real, mine. It incorporated into my childhood imaginings. So, I don't know, I'm not trying to sound like a sentimental dip about something that happened a long time ago that a lot of people romanticize. I am often not trying to be stupid, but am anyways.

But fuck, 2,000 people? Tonight, I tried to imagine 2,000 teenagers and twenty-something-year-old men standing in that small space and I couldn't, they wouldn't fit. It was a gruesome thought. You think of mass graves being something that occur in worse-off "other" countries: iron-curtain Europe or the middle east. I'm not trying to be political; it's just weird to think: there is a mass grave less than half a mile from where I sleep.

I don't know if thinking these grim thoughts made me run faster or harder. I had a good run. I saw a swan on the pond in Gypsy Hill park and a guy almost ran my own very breathe-y twenty-something-self over when I was crossing the road. It was warm and the air has smelled so good lately. I'm hungry and awake.

Fiddler fern baby