There's a very small, very old graveyard tucked away on a dirt road not far from where I'm staying in Vermont. It's so secluded, it took me a while to even notice but it's become one of my favorite places.
Park the car by the side of the road, take the small overgrown path up the hill, and there under the towering pines and ancient maples, they sleep. Ebenezer and Abraham, Patience and Mercy. Young wives and babies. Veterans of the Civil War. Victims of the 1918 epidemic. The tombstones are mostly black Vermont slate, the writing still crisp after all these years.
I'm not sure why visiting this place makes me happy, but it does. Historian Gillian O'Brien says graveyards attract a lot of visitors like me — people drawn to cemeteries not out of a sense of mourning or morbidity, but for the historical thrill. The past, she says, is most alive to us when we can perceive it through the life of an individual.
And it doesn't take much — a name, a birth or death date, a location -- for a long-ago life to take shape, briefly. For me, wandering among these gravestones is like greeting neighbors. They walked these same paths and hills, drank from the same streams. Our footsteps criss-cross every day, separated only by the passage of time.
If you love graveyards too, you'll find food for thought in this week's show. Hope you enjoy it!
— Anne