I never mean to be gone from this space a whole month. It just happens.

In the days since I last wrote here my days have been varied and certainly full enough. I went to Lynn's band concert, then a meeting of my Wernersville historical society to learn about Isaac Meyers of Meyerstown, an eighteenth century figure who was murdered through the window of a tavern in what we would now call a drive-by shooting but which then might have been called a "clop-by," given that the shooter was in a horse-drawn wagon.

I attended the final hearing before the township commissioners on the fate of the Very Bad Idea development that no one in this area except the developer wants. (The final vote will come in July.) At the beginning of that meeting we had a moment of silent prayer for the school superintendent, a man only two years older than I who had contended with leukemia for several years. He died the next day, and his memorial service the next week, at which Lynn's concert choir performed, was attended by more than a thousand people and covered by the newspaper and the local television stations. He was a truly great man, the heart and soul of our district whose leadership will be nigh on to impossible to duplicate.

I attended my niece's high school graduation party, struggled with a manuscript about food memories that's going nowhere, broached (very carefully) to Ron the idea of adding a screened three-season porch (another project that is still going nowhere!), suffered a brief and unusual (for summer) period of mild depression, sort of drifted rather than snapped out of that, and now here I am, having written the requisite 200 or so words of throat clearing, ready to continue my observations on a life already in progress.

Yesterday I drove to Williamsport, a town which had once been the logging capital of Pennsylvania. It's about eighty miles north of here, home to Lycoming College and the Little League World Series. One passes Bucknell University in Lewisburg along the way, as well as the sites for a large state prison and the federal penitentiary at Allenwood. (Those places are not noted in the tourist materials.) My purpose was to attend a program about "Women and Their Friendship Quilts" at the Lycoming County Historical Society, a building on Williamsport's "Millionaire's Row" where the logging barons built their spectacular Victorian mansions.

The program and the exhibit were interesting enough, but I had misunderstood their thrust. The quilts on display were not historical quilts but modern ones, produced over the last two years by a group of women who gathered for a series of quilt workshops sponsored by the Historical Society. They were lovely, with many elements and techniques faithful to 19th century designs, and the program was informative, but offered nothing that I needed to go eighty miles to get.

Fortunately, I took a side trip that made the afternoon most worthwhile. I  participate in an e-mail list of historical writers and researchers, and recently, in discussing 19th century maternal losses, a listmember told us that in Beavertown, Pennsylvania, her grandfather's four siblings are buried in a cross formation beneath an obelisk. They all died in the same week in March of 1878, of diphtheria. It was said, she reported, that her great-grandmother was never the same after that.

I knew that Beavertown would be only a 20-mile side trip half way to Williamsport, so I wrote to my listmate and asked for the name on the stone so that I could pay my respects. Thus, yesterday afternoon, on a glorious early summer day known in these parts as a "Susquehanna Sparkler," I turned off US Route 11/15 at PA Route 104 and drove north 14 miles through lovely, sparsely populated and developed rolling ridges dotted with hills of the white pine that made Williamsport's early fortunes. At Route 522 I turned west, passed through Middleburg, and at length arrived in Beavertown, formerly Swiftown.

These are the towns of America's nostalgic longings, towns where The Music Man could take place, where the houses have front porches that people still sit on, the village square has a gazebo festooned with bunting, and petunias hang in waves from the street lamps. Lawyers and accountants and pediatricians have offices in storefronts with windows lettered in Copperplate Gothic.

Beavertown is only a few streets. I knew that the cemetery was beside a red building that was a former school in an area where three churches were clustered, and that one of the churches is vacant and owned by Davey Jones of the Monkees who, it is rumored, intends to turn it into a museum of pop music. I took a guess, and turned right at the familiar community library sign, and after two short blocks came within sight of the buildings my correspondent had described.

The red school is now the Beavertown Community Library and borough offices. The cemetery is between that and St. Paul's United Church of Christ. The 19th century part is closest to the road, and I could see that it extends back several acres. A new gravesite was visible just beyond the playground behind the library building. A United Methodist church stands perpendicular to the UCC building, and the white church, presumably Davey Jones's property, is parallel to it. That building has a fresh coat of white paint, the windows appear new, and you can see some building materials inside.

Beside it is the Beavertown War Memorial, about a 50 foot square area very well tended and planted with several varieties of roses. Two stone benches stand out in the sun, and there is a plaque on a boulder that reads "1948 -- The living memorial has been planted here in honor of those individuals from the Beavertown community who answered the call of the government in its hours of greatest need in any of the wars in which this nation has been engaged." While I was speaking these words into my voice recorder a synthesized carillon at St. Paul's erupted into several patriotic tunes: "You're a Grand Old Flag," "My Country 'Tis of Thee," "America the Beautiful."

Before I walked into the graveyard I said my "Bracha before Entering a Cemetery for the First Time," a prayer I wrote the winter I studied Hebrew spirituality. It reminds me that I am not just a researcher or a historian or a fiction writer in search of a good tale. I am the steward of the stories of the lives represented in such places.

The Kearns obelisk is only a few monuments in from the sidewalk in the middle of the cemetery. It is small, about chin height for me. It memorializes the children of John and Etta Kearns: Mary Jane, died March 27, 1878, aged 2 years 6 months 16 days; Alice Sophia, March 10, 1878, aged 8 months (or 3 months) 18 days; Joseph Vernon, March 14, 1878, aged 1 year 8 months 2 days, and a fourth inscription underneath John's and Etta's names which I couldn't read even after I had splashed it with water.

I spent some more time walking among the monuments. There is a modern Amish presence in this area, but the Pennsylvania German influence is not strong this far north. There were no inscriptions in German, although some used the broken style of lettering generally associated with High German and Old English script. There were the familiar symbols of nineteenth century memorial architecture -- a hand pointing toward heaven, a hand holding a rose, lambs, angels, obelisks. There were lots of flags but no flowers, nor any gravesite that seemed unusually ostentatious.

These children died the year my grandmother was born. Anyone who actually knew them is long gone. The children of the surviving brother are in their eighties. The memory of Etta Kearns's anguish, however, is kept alive by people like me, who comb history for stories, and by any mother who has buried even one child, no matter that child's age.

I took my folding chair from the trunk of my car and set it under the tree at the library's entrance. I sat for perhaps half an hour and gazed out across the ragged rows of stones and the flags waving in the sultry summer breeze. I rested, and I remembered.