There’s a cemetery up by my grandparents’ house that my grandpa worked at after he retired from being a firefighter. He didn’t do too much there, just mowed the lawn, picked up dead flowers, gave the dead a respectable place to spend their time, you know, not living.
When we were younger, he used to take us with him every now and then. It seems like an incredibly morbid place to take children, but there was this sort of separation between us and the corpses six feet under us. Maybe it was the ground, I don’t know. I never once thought about the dozens of dead people I was walking over, I was too distracted by the pretty flowers that littered the grass, most of which I’m sure were just dandelions anyways.
The cemetery was a lovely, quaint little place. None of its tombstones were incredibly large or flashy, except for one mausoleum off to the side. We never went near that, and I can’t for the life of me tell you why. Beyond its property lines there were nothing but trees, and so it was quite secluded. You could spend days there and completely forget that the outside world existed altogether. As a child, although I was mesmerized by the bright colors of the flowers and how soft their petals felt between my fingers, I never really considered it to be a magical place. But now, after years of recollection but not actually seeing it, my memory has this hazy glow to it that can only be described in that way, as magic.
I guess the thing about cemeteries is, even if I can only remember my time there, there were lifetimes of stories just under my feet,  and I can’t tell you a single one besides my own. Rotting corpses and barren bones do not do justice to the vast history lying in wait between planks of wood, under layers of settled dirt.