
In nighttime fog, as you press yourself through tangled cobwebs and gauzy mist, where do your dreams take you in time and place?
Do you, like me, sometimes “chat” with a departed relative or friend almost as if you’re at a seance?
Might it seem so real that you can feel your grandmother’s hand on your arm… or smell the scent of tobacco on your favourite uncle’s breath? Hear the excited timbre of your childhood friend’s voice?
I have very fond memories of childhood (and adult too) visits to a cemetery at a countryside junction between Wellington Rd 24 and Sideroad 27 in the bucolic rolling hills just outside of Hillsburgh Ontario. Huxley Cemetery.

There, I’d commune with my grandparents and their siblings, my aunts and uncles – some that I had met, and many more that left this little blue planet before I drew my first breath of air.
Nowadays, when I’m not at the actual cemetery “visiting”, I sometimes have nighttime explorations in my dreams and fill my head with the imaginings of these ancestors whose very presence made mine possible.
My life rests upon their lives, even though I never knew them apart from family stories and old worn photographs. They were real flesh and blood people with all of the troubles and joys that I have felt in my own life.
In this week’s lyrics post, I’m taking one of my imaginary journeys into the world of my forebears for a dusky chat with my grandparents, Will and Maggie, buried side-by-side many years back along the grassy slope of Huxley Cemetery.
What sort of conversations do you have with your past?
Huxley Stones
by Larry Green
Intro
Before these stones
before this granite’s tome
before you go no further this day
before your sand returns from bone…
slip through the cracks of Craigh Na Dun…
Verse
“… pull up a chair beside
and chat for just a few, would you?
tell us first, where have you been?
We’re sure there’s been so many changes
Since your last drop by to see us
We’re not mere misty strangers
hazy illusions of a painter’s brush”
Verse
“Could you tell us all we’ve missed
these 80 years or so
the big the small dear share it all
parcel up the news from near and far
Were you your parents’ sheen and shine?
we worried so about your mother
to carry such a worried mind”
Verse
“We catch the roamer’s stories
in glimpses as they pass
what war or peace was seen of late
whose hearts are filled with love and hate
If only we could trade places,
to wander streets and dance vivacious
what might we see out there?”
Verse
“And what of your siblings dear?
So sad we never got to know you all
anywhere ‘cept here
by this chiselled quirky stone standing tall
where kinfolk talk in whispered tones
We see the wrinkles on your brow have grown
reminding how days and nights have flown
your face now weathered like our own”
Verse
“Oh my we yawn and close our eyes
under sun it’s hard to fathom
how we weary now, no chore or two to ply
God knows we toiled long and hard
in our many days gone by
this stone of dates you touch is chill and sterile
but in you our hearts stay warm this while”
CHORUS
Tell me, are you a
caregiver creator lover jester
warrior outlaw explorer sage?
Blow the grass, lie with us forever
look up and see the clouds as we do
your bones and blood a part of us together
