Cooped Up

Cooped up long enough, we drove to the country yesterday and headed for the Sheyenne National Grasslands, better known to locals as the government pasture. It’s always pulled me to visit, probably because I have a lot of relatives buried in its old cemeteries. As we drove along I took note of the wet fields along Highway 46 on into Coburn Township. It will be late spring planting for too many acres.

Because it’s so late, not much green shows on the hillsides yet. But when we got to the sandy soil where the cemeteries are, the dead grass crunched underfoot. A fire would travel fast with the yesterday’s wind blowing strong enough to take my hat.

A few days ago Mary said she wanted to see some birds, and as we walked through the pasture we heard a lot of meadowlarks singing their songs. 

The Pioneer Cemetery sets back from the road and can be missed quite easily. People do get to it, though, as evidenced by the names signed in the ‘guest book’ stuck in the mailbox. When we’ve been there before we never thought to open the mailbox and notice one was in there, but now that we found we found it was almost filled up. The last visitors were there Saturday, the day before. In that burial ground I have a great-grandmother and her newborn daughter. The baby was stillborn, the mother died about one month later.

In the area where the Owego schoolhouse used to sit we saw farm machines working. It wasn’t too wet there. The Owego Church cemetery holds quite a few relatives, in fact the husband of the aforementioned great-grandmother is there. When she died, he remarried and they were buried together.

We started making our way home and came to Pigeon Point. We parked at the signs and stood there reading when another car driven by a single lady pulled in behind us. She said she was geocaching and was about .2 mile from her target. She had come down from Grand Forks to spend the day in the country like we had done. I thought she looked about college age, probably at UND, and said something to that effect. No, she’s an 18-year veteran in the Air Force and holds the rank of Major. I know I’m getting old and almost all the girls look young, but I missed the mark on her.