A Blustery Day on Cambridge Common

After a backbreaking Sunday of quilting – don’t laugh, quilting can be backbreaking! – I decided to take a walk down to Cambridge Common in the late afternoon sun. It was 37 degrees and windy, which of course made it feel colder, but the sky was blue and the sun was bright and my cheeks always look so fetching when they are rosy from the cold. Ah, the pleasures of a New England spring!

Cambridge Common is my favorite walking destination. When you live smack dab in the middle of a city, it is important to be able to get to some green space. About a half mile from my house down busy Mass Ave, this park is my closest wide-open place to breathe. There are tall trees, especially beautiful in the fall, long walkways lined with benches for people-watching and daydreaming, a play park for little ones and grassy expanses filled with college kids playing Frisbee. These same open spaces are said to be where George Washington’s Continental army first camped and trained in July of 1775.

The real draw for me, though, is the big statue of Abraham Lincoln. He stands regally in a Civil War monument, a towering structure with bronze plaques on all sides and a stone statue of Brig. General Charles Russell Lowell on the top. One of the plaques states that the statue was erected in 1870 “to perpetuate the memory of the valor of the patriotism” of the soldiers and sailors of Cambridge who died in the service of their country. 1870 – just a few years after the war ended, a few years after Lincoln was assassinated. I get chills thinking about how personal, how immediate it must have felt for those who walked by it in those days and how this monument still stands 143 years later for people like me to stand and ponder. One of the plaques has the succinct and powerful Gettysburg Address, which moves me every time I read it.  If you haven’t read it recently take a look now:

www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm

I am inspired each time by the idea that those who have died for a cause that benefits us leave us – the living -with the task of carrying on their work, so that they will not have died in vain. That is how we can honor them. It helps me strengthen my resolve to stand up for what I believe in and support those who fight for what is right.

I have come to Cambridge Common dozens of times since moving here 2½ years ago, but until this past Sunday I had never noticed another smaller statue a bit further down from Lincoln. It is an Irish Famine Memorial of a family being separated, with the inscription: Never Again Should People Starve in A World of Plenty. How fitting that I should have discovered it on St. Patrick’s Day. I started to clear away some papers at the base, but on closer inspection I saw that what I thought was garbage was actually a small pile of granola bars, left no doubt to ease the hunger some might feel today.

Monuments to a history of hardships and triumphs, mixed with human compassion and the icy wind and blue sky of today: not your everyday walk in the park, unless you are fortunate enough to live down the street from Cambridge Common.

Hop on over to my Photo Gallery for pictures of the Cambridge Common now and in the fall, the Civil War Monument and the Irish Famine Monument.