A year and a half (how has it been that long?!?) I wrote about an old Graveyard near where I live where my cousins are buried. I wrote a little about it in that post.
Before I moved here I had no idea that my uncle lived in Sandy in the sixties. We used to visit him in Portland so I just thought he always lived in Portland. But when my cousins were kids they lived in the community of Cherryville up here on The Mountain.
His daughter, when she was two years old, drowned in Whiskey Creek and my uncle had her buried in the old Cherryville Cemetery. Several decades later he buried his oldest son there, as well. When he found out that I moved to Sandy he has been asking me to go to this cemetery to check on the graves of his kids. Curious about it, I told him I would. But I haven’t been able to find it. I even have a coworker who lives on Cherryville Rd and they were not able to help me figure out where it is. My uncle even drew me a map to the place! Still no luck. So the location of this cemetery has been this huge mystery for me for a long time.
My cousin’s daughter got married in Battleground, WA on Saturday evening so my mom and uncle came to the area to attend the wedding. One of the things my uncle wanted to do while he was here was show me where this cemetery is. So Sunday, after spending the day in Portland with my mom and her gentleman friend, we met my uncle in Sandy and followed him to Cherryville.
I would have never, in a million years, been able to find this place if he hadn’t shown me where it was. We had to turn down this very vague “driveway” that led to a grove of trees. I got out of the car, walked up to the grove of trees and was thinking it was just a grove of trees. There was no graveyard to be seen anywhere. But my uncle knew exactly where to go. He brought his clippers and lopped off a tree branch and, behold, there was a path. We walked into a grove that was covered completely in trees and moss and ivy and brambles. There was barely any light coming into this sanctuary. But I walked a little ways and found the headstone that you seen in the photo above. Then, as I looked more closely, I could see several other headstones peeking through the brush.
As we kept going we had to start bushwhacking our way to the back of the cemetery where my cousins are buried.
Eventually we found what we were looking for. The graves of my uncle’s kids.
They actually looked pretty good. I think they were the only ones that weren’t overtaken with plants.
It’s hard to tell in this photo (my terrible timing makes him look psycho) but my uncle is super stoked that he was finally able to get up there to show me the place.
We spent some time cleaning up the grave site and tried to clear the path a little bit more.
What a weird, surreal evening.
What a weird, surreal place. It wasn’t creepy though. It was actually a very pleasant, beautiful place.
