Parelliland

The reason I haven't posted lately is because I am away from home - or I was frantically preparing to leave home. As we speak, I'm in Colorado at a Parelli Natural Horsemanship course called the Flex Track which is a preparatory course for their instructor program. It has always been a dream of mine to come to the Parelli campus and take a course here and I'm learning things I didn't know I didn't know. Our instructors are excellent and the camaraderie with other Parelli-folk is wonderful.

And it's really beautiful here - gorgeous weather and breathtaking scenery. I was walking up to the parking lot to my truck the other night and snapped this photo with my point and shoot.

 
This is just a small portion of this beautiful place and I feel very blessed to be here. 

Our Pioneer Town Cemetery

The other day when I was on my flower photo gathering walk with my camera, I ended up in our lovely little cemetery which is only a couple of blocks from my house. When I was in high school, we had a student teacher who took our English class to the great big Provo City Cemetery. We all had a many paged worksheet which was really a cemetery scavenger hunt - we had to walk all around the cemetery finding things like "a child's grave with an angel monument on top". Ever since then, I've had a whole new appreciation for cemeteries and how interesting they are. (And I also got over my squeamishness about stepping on graves.)

But I digress.

I've always loved our little pioneer cemetery and it's old sandstone headstones. They're so beautiful, but it's also sad that they are made of local sandstone and have gotten so weathered. Some of them are completely unreadable.



Some of them are actually just a little lump of blond stone.

A few have had a newer, granite stone added, by their progeny, I assume.

 

There really are some lovely carvings on these old pioneer stones - I wonder about the people who carved them.

This one didn't have a pretty carving, but it was adorned with the most beautiful lichen.

 

 There are several graves in our cemetery belonging to Mormon pioneers who came across the plains.

 

This lady is one of my hubby's ancestor's and she was born in the Mormon settlement of Kirtland, Ohio. Pretty cool.

  

The irises were what drew me into the cemetery in the fist place, so I thought I'd better include one. I love the little crenelated edges. 

This post is a little late for memorial day, but better late than never. When I was at my dad's funeral, one of my cousins told me that he wanted to be cremated because he'd never lived anywhere that he was attached to enough to want to be buried there. I thought that was kinda sad. I'm not from this little pioneer community, but it is definitely home. And this is where I will be buried someday. Kinda comforting, actually.