A week ago, last Monday, we found ourselves on the edge of the East Coast, waiting for answers we couldn’t hurry along. A heavy overnight storm had lifted, leaving sunny morning skies and cold gusty winds. We walked from the house we’d rented in Hampton, Virginia, out across a long causeway to Fort Monroe, which sits at the corner of the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and the James River.
Previously known as Old Point Comfort, and as Kecoughtan before white settlers attacked the Indigenous people already living there, it also has the ignoble distinction of being the site of the first recorded landing of enslaved people traded to North America. It is also known as “Freedom’s Fortress,” because according to its own storytelling, the location played an invaluable role in offering harbor to people escaping their enslavement during the Civil War. (Even in their own version, the legal argument is pained and painful — if I’m understanding their sign correctly, Union military leaders decided they could “confiscate” previously enslaved people under a “contraband of war” policy.)
We’ve spent more time abroad walking around old forts and poking our heads into seaside churches than we have stateside, but in the midst of an already difficult and complicated trip to manage family business, it was reassuring almost to do it anyway, just the two of us, a long wander while we waited for a phone to buzz.
Saint Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church was locked up, a marble statue of its namesake out front adorned with a crown of seashells. An old firehouse was now a coffeeshop, guarded by a hydrant painted like a Dalmatian. Signs warned “MOAT OFF-LIMITS” and “CRABBING PROHIBITED” but though the museum and office were closed on Mondays, nothing else was blocked off. So we crossed through the narrow entrance into the fort itself and climbed up a grassy hill. The view was vast, of course. There were old ironwork bases for cannons.
And there were also a collection of small stones — grave markers, clearly. For children? The ages of each were single digits, early teens at best. Sometimes only a single name. I was doing math to consider what pandemic this might represent when the obvious pattern emerged:
Not children. Beloved pets. There were hand carved markers, traditional gravestones, and even a laser-etched portrait. One named Jefferson Davis. More than one named Dusty. Two Cheries (I and II). At least one “unknown.” A 17-year old poodle.
I hadn’t actually realized, Stephen King aside, that pet cemeteries were a real thing, not beyond a couple of family animals who might all be buried together in a backyard. But there, up along the ramparts, were somewhere between two hundred and four hundred dearly departed companions of military families and military service animals.
We had so many questions, starting of course with Punky the antique chihuahua, given we have one of those, or close enough, and her WAC mom, Major Edith. (So far I have turned up only one good reference about her — an interview in the works cited of a 1991 thesis entitled Uncle Sam's Lesbians: Power, Empowerment, and the Military Experience. Sooo.)
Mostly we walked, quietly, taking photos of many of the markers with the clear blue sky pressing down from above.
RED JACKSON
1975
SPECIAL CAT
MAIDEL
1936
COUNT
1963 — 1972
BELOVED DACHSHUND
THE JAMES’
ARMIN
1946 — 1955
LOVED BY THE MAC INDOE’S
BLACKY
1961 — 1972
SUPER DACHSHUND
PUP
1949 — 1965
BELOVED PET OF THE DELAMATER FAMILY
ADONIS
1970 — 1979
LOVED BY THE WEIS’
ELMER WILSON
1967 — 1978
IMP BAILEY
1954 — 1964
CHADOCK
BELOVED PET OF BOB & PHIL NOBLE
1968 — 1973
PATSY TALBOT
1979
JEFFERSON DAVIS TALBOT
1984
MAMIE
1970 — 1978
GENIE DOBE
1961 — 1973
LOYAL FRIEND OF THE JANKOVICH FAMILY
TOODLES
WOOD
1957 — 1969
SHE SMILED ON OUR LIVES
YOGI
WELKER
1964 — 1981
OUR BELOVED POODLE
PUNKIN
BORN JAN 1 1972
DIED SEPT 4 1982
ALWAYS LOVED
C & S WINGO
OUR NOBLE SHEPHERD
SULTAN
1968 — 1983
“WE LOVED HIM SO”
THE SEVIER’S
JULIE’S JAMIE
1969 — 1981
GYPSY WOOD
1970 — 1984
“OUR FREE SPIRIT”
Christmas, as a person who does not celebrate beyond having married into it, has always seemed to me a holiday less about religion or even family so much as nostalgia. Adults try to recreate versions of their own happy childhood Christmases, or try to improve on the unhappy ones, and tiny new nostalgias are perhaps created along the way. I don’t have any childhood nostalgia about Christmas — if anything, as many know, I have instead tried to sand down a long-harbored resentment of its all-encompassing importance to nearly every other American family I grew up around, yet another flashing reminder I was different. I enjoy the twinkling lights. I love how much my wife loves a Christmas tree in our living room.
I’ve been thinking about nostalgia a lot this month, or maybe I should say I’ve been thinking about the past, and the stories we tell ourselves about it. This is often what I’m thinking about, but the last two weeks were one long underwater dive down into its watery depths and so I’m trying to sort pieces into something that makes sense, if that’s possible, and — even if it is, it’s not really my story to tell. Stories.
So many stories. Fragments of sentences, of memories, of paper trails and photographs and drawers upon drawers stuffed with possibly precious artifacts. Days upon days of tiny decisions about possibly monumentally huge moments in lives past. Keep or toss? Shred or trash? Ask about or don’t ever mention? Thousands of choices made at a dizzying pace. No one, I decided perhaps cruelly, has lived a life so great it demands this detail of archive. Toss. Trash. Don’t ever mention. Do we have to preserve the hardest and most painful parts of a life in order to remember it? Could we forget even if we wanted? At what point, having all been to various therapy and treatment, can we stop talking about it altogether without some ghostly concern we’re doomed to repeat what we haven’t yet fully re-processed?
But — even the tiniest and most dependent creatures amongst us leave a trail, a marker or a memory. Every one of those stones at Fort Monroe held a lifetime of little loves. Here, unearthed amidst all the purging, is finally a proper photo of our beloved’s namesake, Uncle Tommy’s blind poodle — the original Miss Thing that he rescued from a dumpster some thirty years before we found our own raccoon-looking savior, a decade ago this week.
I’m writing this with our own Miss Thing curled up under my laptop while Jessica sleeps. We’re home now, both sick either from exhaustion or some kind of bug or some bad choice we made while trying to refuel our bodies amidst all the rest of it, or probably a combination of all of the above. I asked Jessica if she wanted to open a few presents I’d stashed under the tree before we left, knowing we’d want something to come back to, and she said she was too tired before slinking off to bed again, trailed by the dog who insists on sleeping on her legs until she feels better.
I suppose this is my first Christmas letter. Am I doing this right?
Merry Christmas, friends, from me and my beloved Jessica and our dear Miss Thing (II). Wishing you and yours joy and peace and happiness and just the right amount of nostalgia.