This is how I explained myself in the first book I wrote about graveyards...REMEMBER ME AS YOU PASS BY....published 1994 by Glenbow Museum, republished by Deadwood Publishing in 2000.

For three summers now, I have tramped through a lot of graveyards- not a particularly normal thing to do, I know. Had I climbed flagpoles and eaten worms while at the top, I would not have been regarded with such suspicion. But to wander through graveyards, that is truly weird in a world that has a lot of ways to be weird, so I’d better explain. I did so because of an old graveyard in Canmore, Alberta, and a pile of rocks in central Alberta. Truly.

And then I tell the story of the grave for Nelio Vola, a two month old baby who died in 1910. His tiny gravemarker was hidden in a tangle of rose bushes and weeds but at the base, carefully wired to the marker itself, was a new silk flower arrangement. Who came to mourn this child so many years later? What does it tell us? There are no Volas in Canmore anymore. Where did they go? And so on. In other words, I’m writing history but in such a way, you’d never know it. I just tell a story but history is story, after all.