This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about, well, just about everything here on

this show.

And one of our favorite regular features is a feature called Final Thoughts.

And today, our regular contributor, Bill Brecht, tells us a story from his little town,

Antrim, New Hampshire.

Antrim's voters elected me a cemetery trustee in 2018. I'd help two other trustees

govern the town's four public cemeteries. It's meant receiving occasional telephone calls from

relatives of deceased persons who wanted to be buried in Antrim. Among the usual reasons for this are

that the deceased was born or spent many happy summers in the town. The callers generally asked

about getting the grave dug. I gather the correct term of art is opening the grave.

I refer them to a pleasant, good-natured and compassionate gentleman with a backhoe

who performs this office for a funeral parlor in the neighboring town of Hillsborough

and for anyone else in the area who needs his services.

Antrim's public cemeteries are center,

meetinghouse hill, north ranch, and over east. I visited them all before my election. The

town's department of highways had maintained them well. Three of the four are now full,

with many dark gray, heavily weathered slate markers

from the 18th and 19th centuries. Only North Branch is active, which is to say new customers

are welcome. Recently, after a friendly and sympathetic chat with an older woman who wishes

to bury her son's remains here, I strolled down

to cemetery road, a well-kept dirt road that borders my property, just beyond an unnamed stream

...