This is the church at Macedonia as it stands today; the old church long ago replaced by the "new church" you see above; and, next to it, the shelter they now use for their "dinners on the ground."

The old cemetery is still there. You can just see it in the background. But even the old cemetery has not gone unchanged.

Grass now grows where once the grounds were bare and swept clean of all vegetation except for a few trees. The seashells and broken bits of colored glass which once covered many of the older graves are now gone.

One of those graves is the grave of my grandmother. It is the one in the foreground of the above photograph, the one with the dark colored tombstone. Her name was Elvie Catherine Mobley Garrett; and, she died in 1905 at the age of 24 when my father was just four years old. Buried with her is the unnamed infant daughter she died giving birth to.

My father told me, because his father told him, that she had blond hair and blue eyes. I have never seen a photograph of her. By the time, I came along they seem to have all been lost. So have any pictures of of her two children who who died before my father was born. Lennie Mae Garrett died in 1998 and Alvah Deleon in 1900. Life back then was especially cruel to children.

In this view of the cemetery, the blond haired man in the background is my nephew, Robert. Beyond those trees lies a "runoff" of the "Little St. Mary's River."

Water levels are extremely low in the photo below on account of when it was taken Florida was in the midst of a severe drought of several years duration ; but, it was there, in that little runoff my father swam as a boy and his father before him. During our family reunions, after dinner, all us kids and teenagers would head off down there. It was our swimming hole as well.

It was there that I, and several other members of my family, returned last April to scatter my parent's ashes.

The young man in the photo is my grandnephew, Chad.