It’s gotten chilly here in Connecticut. The mornings are crisp and the nights are downright cold, at least from the standpoint of someone who moved to Florida a couple of decades ago. It’s time for pumpkin everything now – coffee, bread, muffins, pie, the whole works. And that’s great. But I always get a little sad when summer ends, even when it was a rainy one like this last one. I guess it’s time to move on, though. I’ll have to get out the muffin tins. Maybe light a fire in the fireplace. And hope for an Indian Summer.

When I was growing up, my best friend and I used to walk to a cemetery down the street from where we lived in Connecticut and search for gravestones that had “lockets” on them. “Locket” was our name for a photo of the deceased, set into a headstone and protected with glass and a brass cover you would lift up. The ones I remember were oval, the clothing and hairstyles Victorian looking, and the expressions serious.

I still like walking through cemeteries with old headstones. Some of the carvings are lovely, as are the inscriptions. It makes me wonder who the people were, what they were like, what kind of family they had, what kind of life they led.

These photos are from a cemetery in Easton, Connecticut. The graves there are very old and the headstones are beautiful. Some of the people buried there lived three hundred years ago. Many are buried next to their spouse or with several other family members. The gravestone on the right, for Gershom Bradley, tells us he died on January 15, 1795