When I'm in a bad mood, I say to Ernie, "Let's go for a drive." It doesn't solve everything but it puts me in a different place and lets me process things differently, and I'm usually a little easier on myself. So, yesterday, mid-afternoon, I said, "Let's go for a drive." I had a cemetery exploration throwdown from a friend, so we headed over there. We had to walk through a field to get to it. We looked at it from the road on one side and it was awful muddy from all the rain we had the other day. We went to a different road and thought, "Well, huh. Maybe." So we pulled the car over and hiked over in the wind, trying to find weeds to walk on to save us from sinking into the mud.

I stood there in the middle of the muddy field looking at the gravestones from a 19th-century family. It is primarily the graves of Alexander Boyer (1825-1868) and his children, as well as possibly a sister, Merica Ann Boyer Clouser (born 1833), and her children, two of whom died just weeks apart in 1854. She had a daughter two years later, who lived until the 1880s, but she herself died in 1858, when her daughter was two and she was only 25. Her husband married again and lived into the 1920's but is buried in Mansfield. Oh, I found references to Alexander Boyer as a farmer, teacher, and judge. His wife, Hannah Duckett Boyer, didn't seem to have a stone there that I could see, but some were toppled and of course, some could be missing entirely. I could totally go down a rabbit hole following this family. I will try to restrain myself. It is somewhat magical to me that in the middle of this cornfield a few miles from here could be so many stories.

Dolly, Daughter of A. G. and H. Boyer, Aged 4 mos, 21 days.