A Green Thought in a Green Shade

Since death is with us in recent postings here in Dungannistan, let us continue in the cuddly company of the Grim Reaper. I recently took a trip to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where hundreds of thousands of great and not so good New Yorkers are still lying.

A guard at the gate gave me a map and I wandered off into a golden mist as undiluted sunshine streamed down through the gorgeous green leaves of the trees. Think of the words of Andrew Marvell, the 17th century English poet who wrote in his poem, The Garden:

The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

That was how I annihilated my afternoon. But I did notice the strange mess seen in the above photograph from the New York Times. It seems there is a graveyard worker whose delicate job it is to squeeze more bodies into the cemetery, in areas where older bodies have long since decayed and where there is no immediate living family claim to the plots. Hence, the inevitable digging, above.

While at Green-Wood, I saw another strange sight, which I photographed, below. What was this woman doing, aside from enjoying the sunshine? It seemed she was lying there as if trying out a plot for herself. Was she concerned with the comfort? How she'd look as they lowered her in?