On Sunday morning, I join the grievers and gawkers at Hope Cemetery. Some are here to walk laps in the safety of these narrow roads. Some visit family—devoted mother, eternal father, and the distant cousin who died in infancy in the 1800s. It’s what we do in a small town known for its granite and the laborers and artists who turn stones into stories.

And while we’re here, we’ll detour to see the new monument that everyone’s talking about. My aunt noticed it a few weeks ago and texted a picture to my mother. During breakfast this morning, my mother and I speculated about where it’s located and whose it might be.

The new monument neighbors the mausoleums that loom in the cemetery’s northwest corner. It’s a granite replica of a two-story house with a front porch, colonial posts, and 4-pane windows of another era. The picture didn’t capture four names engraved in the risers of the narrow front steps. My mother will remember the family. They owned a granite shed, and this monument awaits the not-yet dead son who went to high school with my father.

I step lightly onto the porch, tracing rings chiseled into the posts and rubbing my palm over the stone doorknob of a door that doesn’t open. If this little house is a mausoleum, it must have a hidden passage. But it’s the size of a child’s playhouse, so the entrance would be small and the space inside cramped. I squat to look for air vents or hidden levers. Nothing. And still I imagine a visitor inside crouching at a low granite table set with diminutive granite plates and mugs, a hushed space with crypts tucked in the walls like secret storage.

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My childhood home sits on a steep hill in Barre. I walked by it yesterday evening, as I do often when I visit. The lights were on and the front curtains open, but from the street I could see only ceiling and the wooden trim of the doorway that separates the living and dining rooms. The couple who bought it from my mother 30 years ago have hung framed art between the molding and the ceiling. I remember that space being empty except for two weeks in December when we hung a stuffed red and green calico MERRY CHRISTMAS.

Every time I return, I want to knock on the front screen door and sing out “hello” the way visitors did when we lived there. I want to walk the hardwood floors, rummage the cupboards for raisins and walnuts stored in Sanka jars, climb down the glossy purple stairs to the cellar and make a fort of old curtains in a corner formed by a chest freezer and a cement wall beneath the stairs. I want to shave a pencil to needle sharpness using the Boston sharpener screwed to the back of one stair. I want to hear my father whistling in his workshop, a man more than the ghost who visits me with tears in his eyes but never speaks. I want to be the youngest of four sisters, not three.

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I leave the little granite house to visit my father’s and sister’s stones where I repeat the math: 1935 – 1991, 56 years old. 1961 – 1995, 34 years old. The facts don’t change. But their stones, once new, have settled into the order of rows. For months after a burial, fresh sod sinks as the rectangular scar fades into surrounding grass. The little granite house will be new until a bigger monument, or one more intricate or intimate is erected. Then the windows and posts and stairs will recede from our curiosity as we track fresh dirt, a new story, the most recent map of who is where in this town.