the meadow

The Keeper's Promise

The memorial you make for the pet you had at seven is here when you are thirty, remembering them again for the first time. It is here when you are eighty, showing your grandchildren your first friend, and every friend you had along the way. That is the whole idea. We keep it with art, with money put by, and with love, and we will say what we mean by kept, plainly.

The meadow stays open.

We built the grounds to outlast us. Every plot and every word can be preserved exactly as it stands for a few dollars a month, indefinitely, and we arranged that on the first day, before anything was planted. We intend to keep the gates open for as long as there is a meadow to keep, and we have planned for longer than that. Closing the gates would not mean losing the graves.

One tenth of every memorial purchase goes into a preservation fund, kept apart from the money that runs the place, from the first purchase on. The fund's principal is never spent; only what it earns. The tenth keeps flowing until the fund can carry the meadow's costs on its own, and it starts again in any year the fund cannot. When there is enough, the plan is to place it in a trust for the meadow itself, so the gates can stay open no matter what becomes of the keeper. The balance, the tenth owed, and every deposit are counted in the open at the office.

The meadow never writes first.

We send the practical things: your key when you ask for it, a receipt when you buy something, a notice in the rare case the keeper must act on your plot. Beyond that, silence, unless you've told the keeper you'd like to hear when someone leaves something at a plot you tend. Like any cemetery, we don't call you. You visit when you're ready.

What is planted stays planted.

A grave is not ours to take back. Nothing about a plot lapses or expires, and no passage of time makes one less kept. Honesty requires one short list, so here it is. A memorial can be removed only if:

the law compels us;
it was made to harm someone, or is not what it claims to be;
it uses someone else's work, and they ask us to take it down;
the family who made it asks us to.

Nothing else can remove a memorial. And if one is ever removed under this list, its address is never given to another. A quiet marker remains.

Your memories are not training data.

Search engines and AI assistants are welcome to find and cite the meadow. That is how new families find their way here. But we block the crawlers that harvest content to train AI models. What you lay to rest here is not raw material.

Your memorial is yours.

Any plot you tend can be downloaded as a complete archive, any time, for nothing.

the keeper

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