Moustache Monday: Vermont’s Hope Cemetery And The Moustaches Therein

Last week, while the rest of the staff suffered under the harsh, pungent glare of The Gauger’s awakening, I was continuing my annual tour of New England, a beautiful land from which I can flee in less than a day’s time when, invariably, the sun and other humans wear my sanity down to a raw nub. This year I was in the lilliputian state of Vermont, which plays host to rolling hills, rolling hills with cows, and W.A.S.P.s, who, if they roll, did so out of sight.

While traipsing though the cow-laden countryside, we came into the town of Barre which can claim one of the Northeast’s more elaborate cemeteries. Here immigrant stonemasons from Italy and Spain settled, working their magic upon the granite from the surrounding hills. It was here, after having soaked in the majesty of a solid granite stock car and having been admonished for forgetting the face of Jesus by a couple of verbose pyramids, that I noticed the first stony visage, bearing that most glorious of facial adornments.

So it began. Our excitement at having espied our first moustache barely contained, we stood, scanning the horizon. She noticed one and immediately set off for it. In this manner it continued, we facial hair connoisseurs, gazing determinedly into the distance before one or the other gesturing at a specific point, letting loose an exuberant cry of “MOUSTACHE!”, before gleefully bounding off, past the massive stone phalli rising majestically into the air, to capture its image.

Not the most appropriate behavior for such a place, perhaps, but we did not care, for with nothing but the stoic faces of long dead gentleman to censure us, and our jubilant cries swallowed up by the drone of the caretakers’s lawnmowers, I have no doubt that we did little to disrupt that place, leaving it no less reserved than when we came upon it.

The Moustaches of Hope Cemetery [Flickr]