A Fine and Public Place The old Ithaca City Cemetery is dug into a range of hanging deltas across the gorge and down from Edgewood Place. People have long since ceased dying into that cemetery and innocent arbor vitae trees planted with grave markers are now mature giants, actively heaving the stones.
The civil war cannons in front of the statue of the civil war soldier were the center of war games for us in the East Hill Kids cemetery Club during the nineteen fifties.

The bronze soldier held an actual decomissioned musket, which we occasionally climbed up to examine. The musket was bolted to his cradling bronze hands: its muzzle plugged and its works frozen with poured lead.

The musket disappeared in the late fifties and the soldier himself was gone by 1960. t The bronze soldier was reported to have been hidden at Bridge House in Cornell Heights during the years when it was a fraternitiy, and before my time there. They say he was kept in one of the abutment chambers and brought out for parties, because he could hold a drink in each hand.

On the pedistal and the cemetery the soldier was eventually replaced by what appears to be four fused bowling balls.
Life wins
Ezra Cornell started his family in a little cabin he called "The Nook", down by Ithaca Falls, and didn't build his dream house in time to move into it before he died, though his widow did for a while. Today it is haunted by fraternity boys who sometimes appear in lawn chairs on the roof.
We saw this ineffaball of luminous fog in the branches of an old red oak one morning last spring. The tree is quite hollow, cleft at the top, and not long for this world.
You just stand there, I'll do the talking.
Everyone here sleeps well.
The East Hill Cemetery Club Kids pretended that if you see a tombstone with your name on it, you were going to die.

But David Merkie said quite seriously that we were all going to die, and that he was going to die early. He said he was aging fast and was already forty deathyears old right there in fifth grade. He said it was because he had kissed Lady black-lips, which is what we called the figure on top of the Tillitson monument there on your left. Her lips are still always stained with black algae, I myself never kissed her, but I thought about it.

We have seen David Merkie in recent years,unless it was someone else pretending to be him. After forty years, he looks about the same as he did then.
This is too Wierd, please take me home now.
A Grisly Sight
East Hill Kids Cemetery Club