Pine Grove Cemetery – Brunswick Maine

Sometimes it’s nice to have outside influences give me leads on where to go next. This was the case for Pine Grove Cemetery which I had never heard of and certainly wouldn’t have sought out on my own. The reason it had come up was because it was the burial spot for Major General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain who was the Lieutenant Colonel of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry which fought at the battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War. Apparently we’ve been half-hazardly stalking him and his men since last summer….

But anyways… this cemetery was easy to find but hard to get into as there was a lot of traffic on that road and the entrances were narrow and graveled. I pulled in and parked at the back hoping I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. Instinctively I had somehow found the oldest part of the cemetery and the exact row we needed to find the grave we were searching for! And that was cool and all… with a big dramatic tree nearby. Upon finding Chamberlain we left a penny and discussed quietly how neat it was that he lived a LONG life after the war eventually settling and becoming a college professor here.

So that’s why we were there. What was harder to explain was why we happened to have a cat in a bag wandering the cemetery with us. Or why she seemed so entertained by the experience. That’d be Stormy, short for Stormaggedon Dark Lord of All. She’d come with us to Maine but now we wanted to stop by a cemetery on the way home (two hours from where we started that morning) she couldn’t be left in a hot car – obviously. So she found herself the proud new recipient of a cloth carrier and guess what? This turned out to be just her thing. She’s apparently just as morbid as we are, just chilling in the cemetery.

And since the cat wasn’t taking offense to this interlude we decided to keep ambling and see what else this place had to offer. Most of it was very standard fare – plain stones, the occasional mourning woman, some angels…. and then something wildly bizarre – a modern slate stone with a crazy assortment of carvings ranging from the traditional (a skeleton at the top) to the downright bizarre – a flipped VW Bus on the back. Yes, both back and front were decorated with poems and insignia. Obviously, this peaked my interest. WHO ARE YOU?!

Turns out this guy was a real local character. His name was Walter Stauffer Skold and he was the founder of the Dead Poet’s Society (not that one – although it was named after the movie!) Apparently he made it his life’s mission to find the forgotten and lost graves of poets in the state of Maine. He found more than 600 of them before commissioning this stone to be made for himself. The artist in charge of the project was the grandson of John Updike the famous author. Sadly he died unexpectedly a month after it’s completion and never saw it in his lifetime. But wow – it’s a lovely stone and a great story!

I was delighted by the colorful personalities laid to rest here and took a number of whimsical photos including one of a big tree changing colors (HELLO, it’s not autumn yet!) It was a great way to end our little trip to Maine.

Mayflower Hill Cemetery – Taunton MA

We headed over to the Mayflower Hill Cemetery after reading online that there was a haunted cemetery marker there in the shape of a rocking chair. It was the stone of a young girl who died in the 1800’s and was reported to have come back for a little sit-in every now and then.

When we drove in we found the chair almost immediately with no searching. This once again disappointed my companion who loves the thrill of the chase. Even worse we are both super jaded by going to other amazing cemeteries and this one seemed to lack character.

“No wonder they think this stone is haunted, it’s the only one that looks any different than the others.”

And it was true. This cemetery had a profound lack of creativity. The rocking chair was piled with toys but there wasn’t much else going on. Just a few cast iron stones smattered here and there. We did however find a pretty big monument to fallen veterans which included cannons that were suspiciously pointed directly at local houses and a few mourning women type stones. Curiously Jane Toppan was supposed to be buried somewhere out here. She was an Angel of Death, a female serial killer nurse who admitted to killing 31 of her patients between 1880-1901 with morphine. She died in an insane asylum and doesn’t appear to have much of a marker, just a tiny headstone reading, “981.”

Burial Hill Cemetery – Plymouth Massachusetts

Before setting out for Plymouth Rock earlier on in the day we had a brief discussion about where the oldest gravestone in New England was. Did we have gravestones that dated back to the original Pilgrims? I mean… it’s not like they packed the boat with a gravestone for each passenger before they set sail. If they did that would have been super ominous.

“Should we bring more food?”

“No, Prudence over here still needs room for her gravestone.”

See, that just doesn’t track.

“The oldest graves would have been Native American.” My companion tries to argue.

Well yes and no… I mean yes, there were as many indigenous peoples here when the Pilgrims landed as there are people all together now. But the natives weren’t into marking their graves with anything. From what I gather most of them in the area merely brought their dead to sacred spaces and allowed them to be eaten by the animals they worshipped in life. A way more beautiful and nature friendly good-bye if you ask me but what do I know.

But back to the pilgrims… what were they doing with all their dead?! According to Google the oldest gravestone in New England goes to one of the original Pilgrims Myles Standish who died in 1656 and is buried in Duxbury in what is claiming to be also the oldest cemetery in the US. However now that we were on Burial Hill in Plymouth a lot of the plaques were claiming they had the oldest grave markers. The oldest still standing was of Edward Gray who died in 1681. And here’s where the nit picking begins because even though the gravestones were originally made with wood and have long since decayed several of the plots here potentially predate old Myles there. Do I smell a pointless small-town feud??

All quibbling aside the cemetery was indeed on a very steep hill which was… fun… to climb. And there was a pretty nice view up there which makes sense because before it was a cemetery it was the site of our first fort. I guess it didn’t take that long to piss off our neighbors and we went from, “Can we borrow some food so we don’t die?” (probably mimed as we didn’t have any way to speak to these people) to “Oh, by the way, since you’re all heathen savages and all have you ever heard about the one and only true God?” in what, fifteen minutes? Something like that. Yeah, I’d build some thick goddamn walls too.

ANYWAY. Back to the present. Many of the original stones have been re-backed and preserved with startling efficiency. There’s also a number of monuments and plaques and the most beautiful carvings of death heads, skulls, and cherub heads. Some were VERY unusual. And I took ALL KINDS of photos… but my camera lens decided to crap out so none of them are even remotely sharable except for a handful I took with my cell phone. I apologize for that but here they are.

St Anne’s Cemetery Cranston Rhode Island

It’s spring and its finally time to start up Catching Marbles again! And what better way to do that than to take a sweet little amble through a garden cemetery? And let me tell you this one was a douzy!

I’d never heard of St Anne’s but it’s a Catholic (mostly Italian) cemetery hidden away in Lincoln Rhode Island. There are a lot of normal head stones here but there’s probably even more that are severely monied. I’m talking vault styled mausoleums complete with stained glass windows, family plots that look like their own mini gardens, stones that are enormous and ornately carved with religious imagery, and even one where the Virgin Mary was kept safe behind a milky aquarium-like shield. Clearly many of the people here were wealthy beyond measure. And Italian. And Catholic. And perhaps had a lot to repent for. Make of that what you will. I’m not making any potentially lethal enemies today!

St Anne’s was shocking not just in how much wealth was on display here but just how many people were buried on these hallowed grounds. What initially looked like an ordinary mid-size cemetery from the gates just sprawled and stretched out for acres and acres. We only explored a small fraction of it. Enough to get a lifetime’s worth of Virgin Marys, starved Jesuses, and sooo many creepy angels. I’d love to return here during a different time of day when the lighting is kinder and see if I can get any more dramatic cemetery photographs. All and all even though my camera fought with me the whole time this was an awesome trip I would highly suggest to any other taphophiles and I would be more than content to return here myself someday.

Mount Olivet Cemetery – Frederick Maryland

What’s a vacation without a stroll through a local cemetery? Boring, that’s what. Long before we packed the car we had our hearts set on checking out this cemetery. My travel companion was interested in it’s history (it is the mass burial grounds for a great deal of Civil War soldiers who died in the area during four separate battles – over 400 of which remain unidentified.) For me it was less about history and more about seeing what cemeteries look like in a different part of the country and this one looked big and old with some stones going back to the 1700’s.

We’d been flirting with this cemetery for days. Our first glimpse of it was at night when the gates were closed. We decided to walk around the fenceline aside the road and see how big it was to determine how long we’d need to explore it the next day. It went on and on and on and on…. and strange things kept happening. My camera refused to snap any photos, my travel companion was complaining of the smell of pipe smoke… It was time to hang this one up for the night.

The next day we once again didn’t make it there before dark. However there was still an hour or two before it closed so we drove in to check it out all the same. We noticed that there was a large monument at the beginning of it memorializing Francis Scott Key, the writer of our national anthem who was buried under the aforementioned monument. We would find his parents in the cemetery later on – protected by a little iron fence.

Also buried here were Barbara Hauer Fritchie who became famous when at the age of 95 she refused to surrender to the Confederate troops marching through her property. I guess at ninety-five you have very little to lose but it’s still a great story about a fiery old woman. And somewhere nearby there is the grave of the US’s first unofficial president and his wife who served before George Washington. I’m sorry I have already forgotten their names. Luckily I took photos that read John and Jane Hanson. So there, I don’t have to remember. Also of note was the first fireman to die in the line of duty, a bunch of soldiers from every war, and a memorial to the children who fought and died in the Civil War. Yes, children. And of course there are congressmen galore sprinkled throughout like confetti. And for the more gruesome there is a whole section for infants nicknamed “babyland” and a mass burial of Civil War soldiers who died in battle. This was more than enough to make me wonder if anyone was still lingering here after their demise. If so I didn’t feel any of them on this particular night.

On our last day in Frederick we took a huge chunk of time to go see the cemetery during daylight hours. It’s so big that it’s split up into sections – each named after a letter in the alphabet. I was drawn to the more ornate monuments, many of which had imagery on them I was completely unfamiliar with, others which I had seen before (like the cross and crown) but not often back home.

This cemetery was completely engrossing. Every time I thought we were done someone would find something else interesting. And we never did find the children of the Civil War monument but we did visit Confederate row where I learned that many of the confederates were poor whites… essentially fighting against their own interests (you can’t tell me an economy that favors slaves would have any higher opinion of exploiting those only one tier higher than them in class.) A lot of them were fighting for weird subtext kind of things like pride for their community or because that’s who their brother was fighting for or because of a convoluted misinterpretation of “states rights” – which I hear even today and it’s completely asinine. Freedom of the States does not mean freedom of the individual to do whatever the fuck they please – even the first pilgrims toppling off the Mayflower had a system of laws they had to abide by. Plus freedom of the individual should never extend to freedom of that individual to take the freedom of another individual. That’s just not workable in any way shape or form.

I got depressed thinking about all this. Because those Confederate soldiers who were so callously misled by the powers that be… they’re still very much alive in the bodies of their grand children. And still fighting against their own economic interests. And the idea that we never learn from history became very tiring to me.

My travel companion was struggling with all this too because at some point someone had torn down and defaced the Confederate memorial… which was placed by the Union to honor those they fought. I can understand the distress of this but I also understand there are A TON of Confederate statues erected in the 1960’s in direct response to the Civil Rights movement to basically scare people of color into accepting the status quo. And those statues… should absolutely be torn down. But this is America. We’re not good at nuance so maybe it’s for the better this statue has been lost. And maybe in the future, when we can all agree racism and all it’s various institutions are bad, can we look respectfully back at our own turbulent past.

This cemetery gave me a lot of food for thought. I learned things I didn’t expect and came home a humbler person for it.

Edgar Allen Poe’s grave – Westminster Cemetery – Baltimore Maryland

Before leaving for Maryland my travel companion learned that Edgar Allen Poe was buried in Baltimore and asked if he could be lucky enough to see both the grave of H P Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe in the span of a month. I didn’t see any issue with this as I love walking through cemeteries and used to know The Raven by heart. So of course this was the first thing we had on our list of to-do’s and the first thing we actually accomplished.

Edgar Allen Poe is buried in the Westminster Cemetery which is still attached to a church and is gated with appropriately Gothic looking iron fencing. It was still daylight so we were able to go in and take a respectful look around. A few tourists were crowded around Poe’s monument but the rest of this dainty cemetery was unpopulated by the living. And boy was it unique! Despite being small it had a lot of character. There were historic markers spread out explaining that a lot of the important people of Baltimore were buried here. Some told stories of prominence while others shed light on tragedy like the mother who lost ten children in her lifetime. Because it was part of church property we got to see stones that were right next to the building a few which seemed to be under it. There were also a number of tombs that appeared to be bricked in above ground burials, the likes of which I have never seen around my New England home. I always thought this was the sort of thing cities prone to flooding did but maybe there was some other reason. Also nestled in a quiet and almost hidden corner (which we only discovered after our guest disappeared around a hedge) was a series of monuments that had some Egyptian flare. One was shaped like a pyramid, another had very Egyptian looking busts. I guess it was in vogue at the time.

All and all this gave the entire cemetery a very unique charm. I almost didn’t want to leave. And of course we found both the original grave of Edgar Allen Poe and his current resting place across the cemetery. Both were adorned with beautiful stones. I couldn’t imagine a better place for one of the founders of the horror genre to be spending eternity.

Swan Point Cemetery – Providence RI

Swan Point Cemetery is a gorgeous 200 acre garden cemetery that I had been meaning to return to so I could take photos and blog it. My first visit was to find the grave of H P Lovecraft, which we did, but it was a very short visit as the cemetery was closing within the hour. This time we made sure to leave quite early so we could have the time to walk the entire grounds and I must say there was a lot to see!

I think I was struck with the diversity in this particular graveyard. There seemed to be a lot of different ethnicities calling this their last resting place. Some of the stones even had different languages on them and a lot had symbols and designs even I was at a loss to interpret – which is always great fun! And mixed among them there were mausoleums, pillars, crosses, angels of all sorts, bronze statues, and a great deal of truly creative stones. One was even in the form of a dollhouse with the front door reading, “welcome home.” In fact there was a lot of endearing messages on these stones that would melt anyone’s heart – words of affirmation and love – poems, epitaphs, and Bible verses.

I was also enamored with how many kinds of monuments there were here – everything from traditional slate stones, to simple marble, to ornately carved marble, to metal, to natural granite boulders which were probably already there, to metal and mausoleums. It gave this place great character!

And so did all the infant stones. There were a lot buried within family plots that had not only their own stones but names in recognition of their exceptionally brief existence. It was pretty clear a lot of these were likely stillbirths and it sort of hit a soft spot with me. Having toured a lot of the less wealthy cemeteries I know historically infants and toddlers frequently weren’t given stones and of the handful of infants I have found almost none of them had names – instead being listed as “baby.” Sometimes they’d be buried with their mother if she also died during the birth or shortly after. I don’t think it’s because the poor loved their children any less – I think this was more a question of who has the luxury to spend time mourning. Infant deaths have historically been very common and in those days women were usually encouraged to just move on without any real grieving period – just pretending it never happened. It was another sobering lesson on the realities of the economic classes.

Another one of these reminders came in the form of the servicemen I found – coming from each of the wars of the past century – their memorials often had whole passages written on them on how exactly they died – overseas, during battle, as a prisoner in foreign lands, or in the hospital after being injured in battle. I was not used to this. I was used to the only identification that a serviceman was buried being the flag planted aside the grave that is paid for by the state. It was a lot to take in.

Meanwhile we did manage to find the grave of H P Lovecraft. I like finding author graves… the tokens left on them are frequently interesting. Today someone had left a bottle of whisky, a woolen hat, and a series of rubber duckies. Why, I have no idea but it was fun to speculate!

All and all I had a great time and think this would be a wonderful place for a little stroll or even a picnic. It was mid October when I visited and freakishly warm at more than 70 degrees. The sun melted me into a puddle! But other than that it was very pleasant for both me and my travel companion.

Apple Picking at Whittle Willow’s Spring Farm in Mystic Connecticut

Thursday was my birthday but I really didn’t feel like celebrating. I have been in a stress-induced haze for a year and didn’t make my goal of publishing another book on my birthday as is the tradition I set for myself. As such I was feeling less like my birthday was about celebrating surviving another year of life and more about marking down I was another year closer to death which seemed a bit grim. And because of this I didn’t give anyone any warning it was my birthday.

I did try to figure out something cool to do but I was coming up short so I did what I always do in these situations – I left it up to the Universe – “If you want me to celebrate my birthday, you figure something out.” And it did! Sort of out of nowhere we ended up getting together with another friend who suggested we go apple picking. I haven’t been apple picking since I was just a wee one so the thought of it definitely tickled my brain. Yes, this would be the perfect way to spend my birthday – and was it ever!

We ended up going to the Wittle Willow’s Spring Farm in Mystic Connecticut. They had a lovely little farm stand set up and both an apple orchard and a pumpkin patch to pick from. They handed us some brown paper bags and off we wandered into the vague direction they were pointing. We were told there were lots of McIntosh, some Granny Smiths, some Red Delicious, and a few Golden Delicious somewhere out there. And so we wandered out into the orchard which was… not marked in any way and the trees didn’t even grow in proper rows but seemed to be dotted at random. We found some Granny Smiths but they too were not in a cluster but rather smattered about in between all the McIntosh. It was pure chaos and only about to get more chaotic.

For here in the middle of the orchard was a neatly groomed stone wall with a tiny old family cemetery within it. There was even a sign dating it to the 1700’s. How ironic is that that we went to probably the only orchard with a cemetery in it?! Obviously I was charmed. Meanwhile my companion was charmed with a singular pair tree just hanging out and chilling.

“They’re just funny looking apples.” My dry sense of humor is sometimes lost on those who have to endure it.

When we all had our paper sack loaded up we headed back to weigh and buy them. It was $1.50 a pound and we all made out like bandits. I’ll be making apple butter and probably apple sauce. There was talk of apple juice, pancakes, and pies.

And then we finished our little adventure playing with some pigs sleeping in a wallow. There were three big sows and maybe a couple dozen piglets and the farm stand was selling lettuce and corn to feed them as treats. The second they heard the first lettuce leaf being plucked off they all woke up and ran to the fence. From there it was just a feeding frenzy with the big mamas grunting in disapproval whenever the treats ran dry. The largest one seemed most insistent nuzzling the fence and grunting. She reminded me of a dog with weirdly human looking eyes. The whole scene reminded me of the happy days I lived on a farm throwing one grape at a time into the chicken pen and watching 50 or so hens all make a mad dash for it. Someday I will return to this life but for now I found it very cathartic to just visit.

Our adventures were just starting for the day because after this we wanted to go to nearby B F Clyde’s Cider Mill where I was hoping to score an apple cider doughnut in lieu of a birthday cake.

Hopkins Hollows Cemetery – Coventry Rhode Island

Not far from the Plain Meetinghouse Cemetery we came across another cute little church in the middle of nowhere. Behind it was both a building to house up to three horse carriages during services (so you knew this place was old) and a delightful cemetery behind some iron gates with a sign reading, “Hopkins Hollows Cemetery.” Curiosity got the better of us.

The largest metal monument we found.

We decided to pull over and check it out. It was a somewhat large cemetery considering the town it was located in with 398 burials and 278 stones all of which were in great condition as far as I could tell. They appeared to be mostly from the 1800’s and right away we were struck by one in particular that looked like it had been put up yesterday. Upon closer inspection (and having gently knocked on it) we came to realize it wasn’t a stone at all – it was a blue-grey cast iron monument. Surrounding it were a series of footstones for the Wood family, all of which were cast iron. I’d never seen anything like it. I mean I had heard of zinc coffins being the in-thing for the super wealthy back in the day but a cast iron monument?! The only time I had ever seen anything remotely similar was in the Lollypop Cemetery in Harvard Massachusetts but those markers were tiny in comparison to this. Clearly these people were loaded.

The mystery deepened as a little farther into the cemetery I found several more smaller stones belonging to a range of families that were also made of metal. Whhhhy?? Either way they were PERFECTLY preserved. Over a hundred years had done nothing to slow them down. All and all this cemetery seemed immaculate and well taken care of. So it’s unusual that when I looked it up there was no one of note said to be buried here. Not even town founders or local personalities. If it had any stories to tell it was keeping mum. Still, I walked around and took a series of photos I have attached in a gallery below.

To add to the vaguely ominous ambiance two turkey vultures circled above us. We enjoyed the serenity of the place and the gorgeous hilltop view of a neighboring farm before latching the gate behind us and leaving historic Rhode Island Cemetery CY012 behind.

Plain Meeting House Cemetery West Greenwich Rhode Island

Yet another day I ended up in Rhode Island under the threat of imminent rain. This time around there was a 30% chance and I was willing to take those odds. My travel companion chose a cemetery that has a bunch of completely made up folklore because that was a little different than anything else we have done…

We’d already been to the grave of Mercy Brown, Rhode Island’s last vampire, and it was Mercy Brown who was the inadvertent cause of confusion in the this completely different cemetery. The story suggests that a teacher in the 1960’s told his students about Mercy Brown but his details were vague and he didn’t have her name so the students went out in search of the vampire’s grave with only the scant details they did know – and they decided at some point that the grave of Nellie Louise Vaughn must be the vampire. Nellie died in 1889 from pneumonia at the tender age of nineteen. She was not a vampire or even a victim of tuberculosis (which is where most of our vampires are from.) In fact she was an innocent bystander to the chaos that ensued.

All small towns have their urban legends and this is usually how they start – with a dusting of truth, a lot of mistaken details, and the whole story getting increasingly twisted as it’s told generation to generation. In time local teenagers believed so strongly that Nellie was their hometown vampire that her gravesite became a bit of a tourist attraction and with that came the inevitable vandalism that occurred as pieces of her stone were chipped away as souvenirs. From there stories about satanic worship began being circulated until someone took the stone away completely. Was it stolen? Or were respectable townspeople the culprit, having taken the stone to preserve it? No one knows. But not long after her story got even more colorful as the appearance of a ghostly woman and white showed up not long after. Now, is this a true haunting or just a bunch of hilarious hogwash, I don’t know. What I do know is I ended up in this cemetery and it had a lot more charm than it would seem.

First off this place was a bit of a nightmare to find. My GPS for some reason did not register the address at all and my navigator, using his phone, kept falling asleep on me. This eventually resulted in the poor Prius driving down what looked like an unpaved camp road that ended in signs reading, “Dead End. Private Property. All trespassers will be shot.” Which is always fun. From there I got to practice my 300 point turn on a narrow wooded lane until I got my way out of there.

The cemetery itself is at a church that is easy to spot on the corner. It doesn’t look like a functional church but there is a plaque out front telling the history of the area. We weren’t the only ones there. We parked, wandered into the cemetery as the other people in the parking lot watched us freaks. I began to take photos of cool stones and the many adorable mushrooms that were blooming as my travel companion tried to find Nellie’s absent stone. He wasn’t having any luck but I was finding all kinds of interesting things.

One of many Tillinghasts

The cemetery looked ordinary from the outside but it had a few unusual quirks. For one it was still in working order – here smattered randomly throughout were modern burials, probably laid to rest next to their ancestors. This graveyard was chock full of Tillanghasts. This is a name I have never met anyone by even having lived in New England for my entire life. It made me wonder if they had gone extinct in the area. It made my travel companion wonder if HP Lovecraft was wandering cemeteries and taking the names off the stones for his characters – which included not just Tillinghast but a number of others here – and as I would later learn he once “haunted the town in his infancy.” It’s an odd thought but it makes sense. Stephen King has openly admitted to both wandering cemeteries and using the names as inspiration so why wouldn’t his horror writer predecessors?

In addition to this there were stones with poems and histories on them – even one of a civil war soldier who was shot and summarily drowned trying to make an escape by swimming. Many of the monuments here were historically speaking enormous – and in these older cemeteries this is a signifier of wealth. But that wasn’t the only clue these people were loaded, there were also Masonic symbols everywhere, and the most alarming thing were their ages at death. Many here died in their 80’s as far back as the early 1800’s and one was even 101! I have found through my travels that life expectancy is a super flimsy thing – it only seems to apply to the lower classes. These upper classes always had the resources to live very long lives.

And then I found a modern stone with a very sweet sentiment on it. It read, “Life is like a painting. It started with my brush and I have filled my canvas with love.” I usually don’t bother to stop for modern stones but that one touched me. This was a small cemetery but we’d made three trips around it finding one cool thing after another before we finally found dear Nellie who was positioned in the dead center just in front of the crypt which had pentagrams and god knows what else scratched into it – likely by clueless teenagers needing a thrill. We knew it was her because other more respectful individuals had left coins and trinkets – as did we. Leaving pennies is usually reserved for historical figures and a 19 year old farm girl from the 1800’s is not exactly the kind of person who’d fit this category but through the power of urban legend she is now. And I hope she’s enjoying it.

As for it being haunted – I don’t know. I didn’t feel anything weird but several of my photos do have an odd haze over them. I thought it was the sun but one of these photos was taken in the opposite direction as the sun and I… just don’t have an answer for that. Just as the people in the parking lot didn’t have an answer about us – having watched us poke around for an hour they left when they saw us leaving. Protective locals? I don’t know. In any event it was an interesting little jaunt. As always I learned a little something and I hope you have too in reading this.

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