Early in July I spent a day in the Storrs Community Cemetery. I did not wander among graves. Instead I walked beside the old stone walls, looking at shrubs and vines. Virginia creeper bloomed, and the leaves of alder buckthorn glowed glossy and silver in the sunlight, almost drawing the eye away from the flowers. While petals wrapped the flowers in dusty green, stamens rose from the centers of the blossoms, hooded and white, hovering over the pistils. On buffalo berry, fruits absorbed summer and turned pink. Many leaves were so fresh they resembled spring water, ribs running like streams through pignut hickory, yellow in the morning.

I read only one tombstone, a small rectangular marker engraved with the name of a man and the dates of his life, 1917-1990. Attached to the stone and rising half an inch above the granite was the outline of a train engine. Made from iron and turning orange with rust, the engine was old-fashioned. Two wheels on each side powered the engine, and a cow-catcher stretched in front. The headlight bulged like an eye. Above the light the smokestack rose in a soft funnel. Balanced on top of the boiler were a bell and two large metal lumps resembling samovars. The engine, I thought, probably pulled that gospel train coming around the mountain and whistling, as the hymn put it, warning us to buy our tickets. Although I wasn't quite ready to hurry to the station, as the hymn urged, I looked around the graveyard and thought about where I wanted to be buried. I wanted a plot with a view of trees and flowers. The graveyard was on a hill. Beneath it stretched the university, a landscape dominated by brick and chimneys, and then, most strikingly, the silver dome capping the basketball arena. I could live, I thought, for a few years with chimneys. Eventually the university heating plant would stop burning oil, and the chimneys would be removed. The dome was a different matter. The emphasis the university placed upon athletics trivialized learning, and seeing the dome for decades would gnaw at my vitals worse than a bucket of worms. Bury me, I decided, over the lip of the hill, close to Unnamed Pond, amid poison ivy, in the shade under the raccoon tree, near where orioles nested each spring.

I didn't fume much about athletics in July. For me graveyards are happy places, and a turn among tombs always brings stories to mind, sometimes sad stories but more often than not humorous ones. Not long after purchasing Haskins' Funeral Home, Slubey Garts bought the south slope of Battery Hill outside Carthage in order to establish a cemetery. Calling his graveyard The Pillow of Glory, Slubey hired Loppie Groat and Hoben Donkin to clear the land. Loppie preferred the old graveyard near the high school with its boxwood and big cedar trees. "I'd rather die than be buried in a place like this," he said to Hoben while they were wedging up a boulder. Hoben belonged to Slubey's congregation at the Tabernacle of Love. "Well, it's just the opposite with me," he said, leaning on his crowbar and wiping his forehead with a dish towel. "If I'm spared, I'll be buried nowhere else."

When Squirrel Tomkins died, Coker Knox was in hospital, recovering from a gall bladder operation. Coker and Squirrel served together in the Tennessee legislature for 32 years, and soon as Coker was able to get about, he visited Squirrel's grave. Above Squirrel the grateful citizens of Hardeman County erected a statue of Solon, the Athenian statesman. A local artist carved the statue. Since the ancient Greeks were not large people, he made the statue 3 feet high, no matter that Squirrel himself was 6 feet 2 inches tall. Moreover since the artist had never left Hardeman County, much less visited Athens, he dressed the statesman in the only robe he had ever seen, a long white sheet rising to a pointed hood over his head, not just transforming Solon into a pigmy but initiating him into the Ku Klux Klan as well. The graveyard was empty when Coker visited it. The quiet made him melancholy, and Coker did not notice the finer details of Squirrel's memorial. Coker had, however, recently completed the advanced course in poetry at the YMCA night school in Nashville, and his thoughts were elevated. "How sad," he said when he saw the grave, "not a worm, no, not even a blood-red cherub now parades around this desolated sepulcher." Coker's thoughts lay, as he put it, "too deep to geologize." "My feelings," he later wrote Squirrel's relic Minnie, "marched like telegraphs to the drumsticks of a better world, feathered songsters wobbling in its tepid glens, its creeks festive with seraphic ripples and crowded with the rowboats of paradise, in a sacred grove of hackberry trees a celestial choir on its knees, doxologizing and whistling salvation, in the brothers' hands, Bibles, sweet cordials of the grave."

In July when the children were at camp, hours occasionally gaped like graves. Whenever a day seemed empty, I planted it with story, shoveling in character and place. During her first year at Ward-Belmont in Nashville, Orene Hamper published two poems in the college yearbook. When she returned to Carthage for summer vacation, Orene showed the poems to Vester McBee who cleaned and cooked for Mrs. Hamper. The poems impressed Vester. No one in Gladis wrote poetry, and when Vester visited her grandmother MaudyMay, she mentioned the poems, saying "Miss Orene has shocked us and turned out to be a poet." "Good Lord! Who would have thought it!" MaudyMay exclaimed, before asking: "Did you find out who with? And she has the nicest parents in Carthage, ever so polite and well-educated. Well, I never."

* Samuel F. Pickering's tenth book, A Walkabout Year, an account of spending 12 months in Australia, is scheduled to be published by the University of Missouri Press later this year. "July" is taken from an as-yet-unpublished collection of essays called "The Blue Caterpillar." He teaches English at the University of Connecticut.