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In my teen years, I lived down the street from a cemetery, but I never visited it. It was at the terminus of the road, about two blocks from my house, but in the other direction was my school (less than a block away) my town, my friends. The whole flow of my life was in the other direction, and so I never went to the cemetery.
Until one day. One grey day, early February of my senior year. I had no school, my friends were all elsewhere for the moment, and I decided that I finally wanted to see the cemetery. I walked up the road and entered its grounds. I was alone there. I walked among the headstones, all of which were of the flat variety, plaques embedded in the ground. Neat, evenly spaced rows. There were none of the giant crosses or statuary, none of the more exuberant kinds of headstones. It was a very well-behaved cemetery.
But as I approached the periphery of the cemetery, I found that it did not all seem well-tended. I saw a section that, from a distance, appeared to have been trashed. There seemed to be debris lying around. I approached curiously.
The headstones revealed that it was a corner of the graveyard set aside for the burial of babies. None buried there had lived more than a few months. Some had died the day they were born.
The "debris" was items that the families had left at the graves. Balloons were deflated and laid limply on the ground. Stuffed animals were ratty and smeared with mud from melting snows. I realized that they must have been set out at Christmastime, now a month and a half distant. They were scattered about now, by animals, people or weather I do not know.
But no one had removed them. I guess no one wants to be the one who takes teddy bears from dead children. So they laid there. I don't know for how long. I never went back.
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