One of the many things I love and admire about Jimmy DiResta is that he can’t hide his generous heart. You can see it in the way he supports and nurtures other makers, the way he treats his many animals, and his overall great spirit. That big heartedness carries over to respect for the dead, as can be seen in how he’s been treating the graveyard that came along with an upstate NY farmhouse he recently bought.

The graveyard, which dates back to the 1700s, was in bad shape, with many of the headstones fallen or knocked over and broken. Jimmy has been repairing and uprighting the stones and generally restoring the yard.

In these videos, he and cemetery restoration expert, Wade Fowler, set about finding the missing pieces of one of the headstones and putting it back together, reseating other stones, and straightening a small obelisk monument on the site.