Summer Haven

Athens, Tennessee, a small town north of Chattanooga, is the setting for Summer Haven. The guide to the tour is a former worker on the grounds, now a middle-aged man who visits from time to time out of his past attachment to the populace that rests there. On one of his afternoon stops the chaperone leads the reader to an assortment of graves, where those in repose tell their particular stories of how they arrived at such a place. There is Bette Marie Chandler, a former country schoolteacher who succumbed to Alzheimer’s but remembers vividly the first crush of her teenage years. There is Grantland Trammell, a World War Two veteran who recalls being at a Doris Day concert on the night before embarking for the front as a soldier and his life afterwards wherein loneliness always seemed to close in upon him. There is Melinda Joan Brewer, who died nine days after her birth, yet still offers her take on never being in the world of the living but still learned from her years of reposing on the grounds. These are but a few of the persons the reader meets in this visit to Summer Haven Cemetery, three of a number of tales about what went on in the living world during their existences and how Eternity is even longer than can ever be imagined.