Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Natalie Rose Richardson is a poet and writer who was born in New York City to a long line of border

crossers and proud people of blended heritage.

In this essay, Natalie searches for her great-grandfather's grave in a historically segregated

cemetery and confronts the American notion of paradise as an ideology which imposes

walls of separation onto the multi-layered landscape, allowing some in and keeping others out.

1. A Corner Less Kempt One, a corner less kemped.

I am visiting my great-grandfather's grave.

It is in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the city where my father grew up and where his mother still

lives and works, behind the reception desk at Fairhaven Funeral Home.

I have come from Chicago to stay with my grandparents for a blazing week in late July,

during which I will turn 16.

The quiet local pool cloaked by an assistant living community is closed Sundays. There is nothing else to do

but visit the dead. The cemetery, Lindenwood, is a sprawling 175 acres, a short drive from my grandparents'

subdivision. It is one of the largest cemeteries in the state,

a vast orchard of stones.

My grandmother and I walk leisurely through the cemetery,

fulfilling the British landscape architects' original intent for Lindenwood,

that it be park-like and picturesque to the living, a model of

18th-century English principles. The dead wave us on below. We spend an hour wandering the pristine

...