Makeshift cross erected at Business US-31 and Green Street, near Cuti's Cafe, has appeared since the end of winter 2012.

A poet named Greg Bliss has expressed an interest in documenting all the roadside crosses in America. He's too late. He would be better off writing a few poems about the impulse and spend his spare time painting. Leave the documentation to an almost pathologically compulsive makers of lists. Or let someone write an app for that, crowdsourcing the information, the same method that built the Wikipedia.

I know this project has attracted the attention of more than one photographer, and studies of these roadside shrines have exhibited at fine art museums. I engage them because of their handmade nature, constructed of materials found at a local lumber yard, made by a relation or friend mourning ritualistically. Most objects along a road are constructed by a machine, in high volume and according to a plan. Roadside shrines are as individual and unique as monotypes or watercolors, and rarely involve measuring tape. There is no measure twice and cut once attitude when making a roadside cross.

This small cross is atypically small. The markers are usually similar in size to a tombstone. Any smaller and this shrine would be constructed of popsicle sticks.