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all-skate:

One of schools I teach at stands directly across the street from a cemetery. It was one of the first things I noticed when I started there, and always strikes me as a weird city planner’s practical joke. One thing you grow up in, the other you cease to grow in. Well, all the parts of you that aren’t hair and toenails.

The school looks like a reclaimed Victorian number, and aside from the charming tile mosaics that have been added in recent years it is a menacing structure looming over a busy street.

The cemetery facing the school is one of Chicago’s oldest and most storied, and for a town known for its old and storied cemeteries that’s really saying something. Its cushy crypts and tumbletown tombs are obscured by a burnt-orange brick wall that stands just maddeningly enough above eye-level. It sort of sucks the poetry out of the whole thing. What good is being reminded of the endless circle of life and death if the death part is tucked away in trees and blandness?

In any case, it’s both heartening and terrifying to be reminded that life is bigger than your own sometimes. It makes one feel part of something infinite, or at the very least, respectfully melancholy but for a moment.

In slightly less sniffly parting, I give you this:

Here, here, herps! Here, here!