More time-travel in Newport

Another one of my favorite totally free things to do in Newport is to wander through the Common Burying Ground, which is located on a soft grassy hillside along Farewell Street just as you drive into town. I COULD claim that I love it there for the historical interest - with over 8000 internments in total, it contains more intact colonial-era gravestones than any other cemetery on the East Coast - but the truth is that I find a sense of peace and ease there that I seldom manage to achieve anyplace else.

The entire right hand side of the graveyard consists entirely of colonial stones, with the earliest of them dating to the 1680s. Name after name, date after date, stone after stone, march up the hill. Some of the stones have weathered into unreadability, but many are as as crisp & clear as if they'd been cut yesterday. Every stone there stands for a life lived, felt, breathed. The air always smells like cut grass and dirt. Bees and butterflies abound all summer.

Over towards the back fence, under a stand of magnificent & ancient cherry trees, lie numerous menbers of Newport's 18th century African-American slave population. It is about as far away experientially as you can get from the bars and the t-shirt shops, the wharves with their Black Pearls and Candy Stores, the whole frantic reality we depend upon to distract us from the slow unrelenting truths to be found on quiet New England hillsides such as these, where nothing ever lies to you.