Coats Cemetery

I took these photos of Coats Graveyard in Rains County on March 25, 2003. The White Iris flowers cover the ground each spring for about two weeks.  I am probably the only person who sees them bloom each year. (MC)

Emory,  Rains County, Cemeteries of Texas

By Mickey Cooper

Submitted with permission by Elaine Bay Nall

Graveyards exist with different personalities.  As you walk thru some you feel a sense of peace and grace.  In others you feel cold and wish for a sweater.  The most interesting, is the one left behind when the community is dead and gone and the cemetery is the only living reminder left to tell the forgotten story.  

Texas has a vast and forgotten legacy, living only by graves left in the corners and fencerows of ancient cemeteries.  Many of these graves are marked by one or two formal tombstones or rocks, leaving dozens of sunken spaces unmarked, without friend or mourner.  A discerning eye can sometimes detect them, in the spring of the year, by the tell tale signs of flowers blooming out of underground bulbs, planted more than a hundred years ago.  Flowers planted by a Civil War widow or those once grown and tended to by the children of a slave.  Each bloom in the spring speaks of the love and loss by families of a whole community.  Communities that were connected by life and death, across the line of skin pigments.  Communities that encouraged individual achievement and cautioned against wholesale acceptance of outsiders.

Those cemeteries at the backside of a pasture reflect the character and strength of people who lived each day without our modern daydreams or misplaced ideas of organic and natural.  A cold and solid stone, with a chiseled epitaph, reveals a clue about family wealth and morals. Cemeteries are not for the dead or dying.  They are living and changing every year.  They may disappear from one generation, but they are recreated by the next.  They exist because man demands proof of eternity.  They disappear because man recognizes eternity.

My Daddy had a disdain for 'end of the road cemeteries'.  He expressed a preference for graveyards that were near town and located on well traveled roads.  He grew up tending to his own Father's grave.  A distinct disadvantage for a boy at the age of eleven.  Unknown to him, I would tend to his grave when I was fifteen.  (Copyright 2003, Mickey Cooper)