them Bones, them Bones...

Our town is a new town, everything here is newer than the 60's. When I first came to Soldotna in 1971 it had around 500 to 700 people but the town was getting all those things that make it a place to live, libraries, fire stations, medical clinics, public parks , baseball diamonds...but the one thing it never had was a cemetery. I guess the town was so young and the young town members were so busy ( fishing I'd guess) that they never really thought about the end and what being interred forever in Soldotna Alaska might mean to people. Maybe it just didn't seem important. But, a few years back a few Soldotna visionaries said enough is enough and this town is going to be here a while so we want all our people, dead and alive , here too. And the Cemetery location, funding and construction debate was on.  Well, you'd think it'd be a pretty simple thing, all towns need a cemetery right?  But this was far from simple, the voters liked one site, the influential in town didn't. The city council wanted a particular site but the neighbors didn't... one opposing group even brought up the issue of groundwater pollution due to our deceased loved ones....mmmm....I had a real hard time listening to the tone of this debate, I mean some of my best friends are dead people, whats the problem? When the smoke cleared and civility and common sense took over we ended up with this beautiful memorial park that we'd never been to until our bike ride this morning.

This place is just down at the end of the road from where we used to live before we moved to Mile 14. Its nice, a road that makes a circle through the grounds with nice manicured grass and some trails for contemplative walking. Who wouldn't want to spend the rest of history in place with a view like this eh?

Naturally with all that happened in the world our new cemetery has a special place to honor veterans that pass on. To our surprise someone had left a real Purple Heart medal sitting on the granite, I guess some local wanted to underscore the solemn nature of this place and donated his medal knowing nobody would take it, its just there part of the atmosphere.

This next pic is what the bare ground awaiting the inevitable looks like. MP and I parked our bikes and we could see a grave stone, Soldotna's first interred. It sat back by the tree line and seemed just a lonely unusual thing to me, I guess some body's got to be first...it just looked so....out of place in a weird way...I wish I could explain it.

MP and I  are really not too surprised that its our friend Bill Twohy, things like that happen in small towns. I did not know Bill well but we are friends by osmosis, driven together by our town. His wife is in MP's book club, his son Sean was our house sitter when we started the Mexico portion of our lives. Bills friends are our friends and our friends are Bill's friends, he was a much loved man, taken by cancer to early. So...I guess that's why we needed a cemetery and when we left his lone grave didn't seem so weird. Like I said , its our town... and we're staying.