On the day before Patriots Day (which is well known for the Boston Marathon and various Revolutionary War battles) and I was in the need to do a little roaming, so this proved the perfect day to go out and knock off a few towns from my Meditate Mass 351 Challenge. I had a friend who had lent me her hammered dulcimer while mine was being fixed, and I figured this would be a good day to go out and drop it off at her house in Concord.
Now, Concord is quite the famous town in Massachusetts, and people from other places have tend to have heard of it because of the many famous people who lived here, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau, among others. It’s also the home of the Concord Grape, and the Battle of the Old North Bridge which started the War for American Independance. I have my own relationship with Concord though. I was born here at Emerson Hospital (as were all my siblings and my Dad), it was next door to my home town so I went here often, and I grew to love contra dancing here through the Monday night dances at the Concord Scout House in the 80’s and 90’s. Additionally, my first musical instrument was the fife, as I was a fifer in the Assabet Village Minute Men, a reenactment group of the town militias that travelled to Concord during the Revolution. Given that, and the date, I knew that the place I had to go to was the Old North Bridge.
This is the site of one of the first major battles of the war (not sure if Lexington was before or after it on the same day) and it’s a place that I went to many times over the course of my life. It’s a national park now, and on this warm April day, the plants were just starting to bust out of the ground. There were a good amount of people, but not as crowded as it would be the next day. I got to see a couple of reenactors with a big flag, but overall it was nice and quite.
And after that, I thought “Where else can I go near here today?”
So, have you come to a place from your past and just found peace there?