Happy Friday — we’re back with more Hot Bones and many questions about how this weekend snowstorm will shake out. Unfortunately, I can offer you no meteorological clarity. But I can provide these 10 instant ramen hacks to make sure you’ll at least have a warm soup belly for a few days.

Do one long thumb scroll for more Cville-specific updates like local events, cool houses, and pets to adopt.

🐶 Speaking of: Romie! Treat motivated and smart, this guy will do anything for peanut butter or a hug. Huge bonus: He sits and waits while you put on his leash (cattle dog, 1 year, 60 lbs).

At long last, this week I finally found time to visit the Panorama Natural Burial site right outside Charlottesville, and I decided to bring my dad along for company and a heavy dose of gallows humor.

If you’re ever looking for someone to remind you that life is fleeting, that we’re all probably going to die pretty soon, and that yes you should go ahead and eat the rest of the coffee ice cream in the freezer, he’s your guy. Low expectations and reminders of death are his mantras.

He’ll bring this up on phone calls (“I’m sorry to hear work is so busy, but enjoy that busyness because tomorrow you might get hit by a bus and that would be worse!”), he’ll bring it up at celebratory dinners (“Cheers to the happy couple! Enjoy it tonight because who knows, an asteroid could kill us all tomorrow!”), and he’ll even bring it up when we’re just out for an unsuspecting dog walk.

We’ll be walking along, looking out at the rolling hills in the foreground and the Blue Ridge Mountains ahead, and instead of pausing to say, “Wow, what a view,” he’ll say, “Did I tell you this is where I’ve decided I want to be buried?”

In fact, when guests come over for walks to the local lake, he’ll actually lie down at this resting point, put his hands behind his head, cross his feet, and really “test things out.” Sometimes it’s just a fun party trick. And sometimes it leads to abbreviated walks and less friends. I’ll often see guests glance longingly toward their speck of a car — their escape vehicle from this creepy death stuff — miles back the way we came.

I think my dad’s rationale for all this is that reminders of death 1) make dying not so scary, but mainly that 2) these types of reminders push us to live intensely while we can. It’s like carpe diem in reverse — and when the living stops, it’s nice to know you’ve got a final resting place with a great view.

Which brings me to our father-daughter trip to Panorama Natural Burial earlier this week. It’s one of only a handful of green burial sites in Virginia and the only one in the Charlottesville area.

The concept is simple: Everything that gets buried here is compostable. That means no embalmed bodies, metal caskets, concrete vaults, or elaborate headstones. I think titanium hips get a pass.

Without all the toxins, chemicals, and foreign materials put into the ground, these natural burial sites help regenerate the land itself. And this in turn keeps local plants and pollinators happy and healthy. The cycle of life and all that. Panorama even has beehives on the property that produce local honey.

Natural burial is a relatively new practice that’s actually a super old practice before embalming became the most popular option (during the Civil War, it turns out, so soldiers’ bodies, as well as President Lincoln’s, could be transported home). As of 2015, cremation is now the most used option.

But natural burials are often a more affordable option (more on this later), and again, they take place in beautiful natural areas. Not to put anyone in a box, so to speak, but these differences typically promote a unique burial vibe — think mourners in hiking boots and denim, rather than black suits or unbearably constraining tights. More guitars, less funeral marches. Abundant wildflowers, no astroturf and electrical cords. All walks of life welcome for services.

Panorama, for example, really lives up to the name. The burial section of the property is 20 acres of rolling fields, meadows, and forest, with views stretching from the Blue Ridge in the west to Carter Mountain in the south. No subdivisions in sight.

I put “Panorama Natural Burial” into my Google Maps and arrived right at 12:30, our appointed time. My dad said “take me to Panorama Natural Burial” and his car took him 850 acres away, to the other side of the property, which also includes UVA’s cross country running course and a compost operation. He was 15 minutes late.

“I told myself not to do that, and then I did it,” he said as he met us in Panorama’s only building, a rustic barn that used to be a wedding venue.

My dad has lived in and around this area for over 40 years, so I gave him a judgmental look for being late. Then I realized Panorama has only been running since 2023, so I gave him a very small shrug of forgiveness.

“The idea is that everything going into the soil is meant to feed the soil,” Stephanie was saying. She’s the general manager of this whole operation, having moved her family from Vermont a few years ago to get things running.

Ryan, the assistant manager (and volunteer radio DJ), added a crucial point about why Panorama is different from other green burial sites: “We treat this as a nature preserve, or more like a park. When you drove in, you probably saw it looks a little bit like Ivy Creek or something like that.”

“The goal is to invite people year-round,” he said. In fact, there’s a weekly walkers group and even an annual Rock Walk & Talk event that’s become popular.

“The gates are open every day, and we want people to visit and walk around. You don’t need to come here only if you have someone buried here.”

That was certainly the case for my dad and me. We were eager to walk around the property and see what the burial area beyond the barn looked like. Surely similar to my dad’s preferred resting place on his farm, and surely a lot different than the manicured cemeteries I’d passed on my way here — the historic UVA one on Alderman and the one off 29 near the Hollymead Target.

Panorama’s burial area is a few minutes walk from the barn, with pathways of mowed grass looping through the meadow and forest. Stephanie and Ryan showed us a few burial sites marked with river rocks and a lot of newly planted native trees, and then they nicely left us to our own devices to explore the area at our own pace.

It was brutally cold, windy, and bright. I had been shivering since we arrived.

“Not that this isn’t beautiful and quiet right now, but I bet this is a lot more idyllic in the spring,” I muttered to my dad, who might not have driven to the right Panorama but at least had been smart enough to wear a proper winter jacket.

“The photos of the area in springtime are pretty fabulous,” he said. “A great time to die, one might argue.”

“Dad.”

He shrugged. Can’t help himself.

I decided to play along: “I know this doesn’t really make sense, but if I die in January or February, I don’t want to be buried outside. It’s too cold.”

“Oh?”

“I want someone to bury me at a Bed Bath & Beyond, under the heated blanket section. Or at a Panera, where at least I’ll have the eternal comfort of knowing people are warming themselves on mediocre bread bowl soups above me.”

“I’ll sneak you in,” my dad smiled.

We took a few more pictures and then hustled back to the seat warmers in the car.

Similar to my dad, I’ve found talking about death and funerals is easier when you’re on a dog walk and not right in it. So here are three things to know about green burials before, god forbid, you or someone you love needs to start thinking about this for real.

1. Cost

This may shock you, so I’m going to put it in a tiny font to make it less bad.

The average cost of a conventional funeral and burial in Virginia is just above $8,000, with cremation clocking in at around $6,000. Cemetery plots themselves average an additional $2,750 nationwide. White doves average $150 - $600, according to Choice Mutual, and you don’t even want to know how much private mausoleums cost. There are also specific costs like internment fees, and none of this is tax deductible.

Natural burials are typically less expensive. At Panorama, there are 3 fees: the plot ($4,000 - $6,000 depending on location, with the forest area being the most expensive), the opening and closing fee ($1,600), and an optional memorial stone ($500).

So total that’s about $4,000 less expensive than the traditional funeral and burial costs. Panorama also does cremation burials ($2,000 - $3,000), although that’s not super aligned with the natural burial component as cremation is an energy-intensive process that releases pollution into the air. Plus, cremated remains are hard on the soil because they’re so concentrated. (Note that Stephanie did mention Panorama will treat cremated remains at no additional cost to families to make them more suitable for the soil.)

Just given the cost benefits, I was curious how many burials Panorama has done since opening less than 3 years ago. Stephanie told me they’ve done about 60 burials so far, and they’ve sold 240 plot reservations beyond that.

Never do math in public, but that indicates this natural burial practice is also likely a viable business operation, with my very rough calculations putting revenue at over $1.5 million so far.

There’s also a whole cottage industry that’s sprung up for natural burial accessories (sorry that’s such a weird way to describe that). Since everything needs to decompose, bodies are wrapped in organic shrouds or placed in wicker, willow, or other types of wooden caskets. These can get pretty artisanally expensive fast (lots to scroll through here with prices hitting upward of $5,000), but I also just googled organic pajamas and this PJ set is $178 and comes in pink stripes.

2. Timing

Before I met Stephanie and Ryan, I had no idea what the timing for dead bodies was. Like, do you need to declare time of death and then run a bunch of red lights to get a body right to Panorama? And without embalming, when do things start to get … sticky.

These turned out to be foolish questions.

“Some families want to keep people at home, and I usually tell them about two, three days and you’re fine,” Stephanie explained. “That’s still a pretty quick turnaround. We just need a 48-hours heads up” to prepare the plot for burial.

“If you work with a funeral home, though, they can usually leave somebody cool for a period of even a couple weeks,” she said. “There was one man who wanted to be buried here, but [it was] before we opened, and the funeral home kept him for like four months.”

This helps with my Panera paradox. Turns out, I can die in January and everyone can still enjoy my springtime burial service. Oh no, that was a death joke. Children really do become their parents.

3. Environmental benefits

Anything that’s not another Harris Teeter or housing development out by the reservoir feels like a win. But Panorama’s arrival on the scene does more than just prevent infrastructure eyesores. It’s a burial site that also aims to improve the land.

“We have a really interesting opportunity to try to improve the environment here, because [before Panorama] this was active agriculture, active cattle land … and in the process, we lost a lot of the biodiversity that used to be here, so we’re trying to restore at least some of that,” Ryan told me.

That means:

“We want to put as much effort as we can into restoring biodiversity here ... the more native plants you have, the more native pollinators will show up, and the more native birds — and the whole ecosystem can start to reconstruct a little bit,” Ryan said.

Ryan is also the guy who designs the pathways, and he likes to shake things up throughout the year. The path we walked on this week will likely be somewhere else in the meadow in a few months.

“My advice is, if you really want to connect with a space like this, come once a month and see it 12 times in a year,” Ryan said.

📚 Long read of the week: How to Be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery is the first selection for Climate Action RVA’s eco book club. And you don’t have to have read the full thing, just the first half (Monday, January 26 from 5-6pm ET, via Zoom).

🏠 Historic house of the week: 1829 Federal brick fixer-upper with 3 fireplaces and insane woodwork inside, plus private access to the Maury River (4 beds, 3 baths, $575k near Lexington). Might be haunted.

⛺ Keep your kids busy during the snow days: By telling them to write an essay! This one’s actually a contest and it’s all about telling the personal stories that capture the heart of the camp experience (deadline is Feb 1).

🏡 Cool rental of the week: 1920s brick home in Belmont, fully remodeled and fully furnished. You might like the original heart pine floors, I like the built-in bar (3 beds, 1.5 baths, $3,500/month).

💼 Job of the week: Bike Technician at Blue Ridge Cyclery (downtown Cville, full time, no salary listed)

🌎 International job: Internal Communications Manager at Patagonia (based in Amsterdam, full time, also no salary listed cmon guys!).

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