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  1. Personally I am finding that all the rodeside markers are starting to get annoying. I don’t know about in LA, but in MO they are everywhere.
    The folks who cut the highway hate them as it makes it hard to cut the area, some of them have been up for several years, and just keep getting more and more stuff piled on them. This is one of the reasons I hate them….OK, hate is a little strong.
    Another is that you can not get over the grief if you have a memorial to that person sitting on the side of a road where you drive everyday, helping to remind you that they are gone. Just what you need while stuck in traffic; A reminder that this is the location where your 17 year old son flipped his car while drunk.
    It is also a very Christian thing. I have never seen any other religous symbol displayed at one of these roadside memorials…then again, maybe it just shows that devout Christians can’t drive.
    Another thing that stikes me as odd; Don’t these folks belive that the dead go to Heaven? So why do they need a memorial at the location of their death? What about people who die at a hospital? Don’t they need a memorial? Of course, if they did that in a short time no one could get in the doors.
    Sorry, I am just complaining. Your picture is very nice, it just hit some trigger I didn’t really know I had. Then again, one of the things art is supposed to do is cause an emotional reaction in the viewer… It did.

  2. Pan — this particular roadside marker is just down the road from my house, so I drive by it all the time. Recently, we’ve had nothing but rain, seems like, and the ditch in front of the cross fills with water.
    I took a bunch of shots of this, most of which show the reflection of the crooked, weed-overgrown marker in the murky bayou water. It struck me as sad in a different way, but when I processed the pictures and went to upload, it was this one (and another over on Flickr) that moved me the most. For me, it has no religious significance whatsoever. Hard to know what it means to the people who put it there… but what I’d have titled this, if I hadn’t posted it on Memorial Day, was “Forgotten”.
    No apologies necessary. It provokes me, too.

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