Concord, MA
A 10 Year Friendiversary Trip
In October 2022, my college besties—Hattie and Leeann—and I traveled to Boston and Concord, Massachusetts to celebrate ten years of friendship. We had met on the fourth floor of Lucy Hall at DePauw University freshmen year: Leeann and I were roommates and Hattie was our next door neighbor. The friendship solidified that year, as our like-minded spirits found solace in each other amidst homesickness, challenging courses, and a party-school culture.
Upon arriving in Concord, we walked through Old Hill Burying Ground. The legibility and clarity of these headstones was immediately striking. They have been, and are, cared for and preserved so well. Leeann, our resident early U.S. history lover, pointed out that the letter “s” back then looked like the letter “f.” It took a while to get used to reading “Blessed” instead of “Bleffed” and “afresh” instead of “afrefh”when reading some of the epitaphs aloud.
A short and sweet one from 1774:
The sweet Remembrance of the just,
Shall flourish when He sleeps in Dust
Many of the epitaphs have striking visuals that modern readers may find a bit too graphic today. In the U.S. at least, I think we want to preserve the dead and keep everything as sanitized from the realities of death and decomposition as possible.
Corruption earth, and worms,
Shall but refine her flesh,
Till her triumphant spirit comes,
To put it on afresh
Another gnarly one from 1783, with a hopeful look toward the Second Coming!:
Tho greedy worms Devour my skin,
And gnaw my wasting flesh,
When God shall build my Bones again
He Clothes them all afresh
One of our main reasons for venturing to Concord was to see Louisa May Alcott’s home, as we all have a deep love for literature (Little Women is a favorite!) and an appreciation for history. The tour guide took us through each room, sharing stories of the Alcott family and the history of the house.
Leeann and I were a bit alarmed at how some of the historical documents and artworks weren’t carefully preserved: Anna and John Pratt’s marriage certificate was so faded from the sun coming in through the parlor window, and May Alcott Nieriker’s oil paintings were also surprisingly unprotected, including her beautiful painting La Négresse exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1879.
After the tour of Orchard House, we walked down the road to view The Wayside, which had been Nathaniel Hawthorne’s house in the mid-1800s, and to experience for ourselves the walks that frequently happened between households. Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in there! Afterwards, we headed towards Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to find Author’s Ridge and visit the graves of the writers, which were surrounded by pens and pencils stuck in the ground. The image on the far right is of a weaving I created of Hawthorne’s house and his grave, a place to sleep in life and death.
Above is the Emerson-Thoreau Amble, a walking path of 1.7 miles between Emerson’s house and Thoreau’s cabin, that we briefly ventured on. Walking through Concord’s history with my two dear friends is an experience I will treasure for years and years to come.