Call me morbid. Call me wacky. Call me offbeat. Don't care.
I love running in cemeteries.
I grew up in Lowell, Mass., just up the hill from Lowell Cemetery on Lawrence Street. The 85-acre cemetery, which borders the Concord River and Fort Hill, was dedicated in 1841.
Some of my first runs were in Lowell Cemetery. It was safe, it was quiet and it was scenic. Cemeteries are teeming with history and the lives of thousands are there to learn from thanks to headstones and monuments. I'll scan them as a I jog by. Wow, that person died 150 years ago.
What was their life like? How long did they live? Did they have a family? What did they do for a living? Where they a military veteran?
It's fascinating.
Growing up in Lowell, it was impossible to avoid cemeteries. The city is home to 16 of them. Some are small. Some are huge like Edson Cemetery, laid out in 1845, and St. Patrick Cemetery, founded in 1832. St. Patrick's is the second oldest cemetery in the Archdiocese of Boston and the site of more than 100,000 burials.
I now live in Chelmsford and often run into Lowell and wind through the roads of Edson, St. Patrick and Westlawn Cemetery, which is on Boston Road.
The other day, with temperatures in the single digits and snow and ice on the ground, I ran in a cemetery behind my house, St. Joseph Cemetery on Riverneck Road in Chelmsford. St. Joseph was established in 1894.
It was a safe place to run and I was amazed at the history as I jogged many of the streets. There is a serenity at places like St. Joseph that you can't find on city streets.
I'm getting older. I'm certainly closer to the grave than I was when I started training for my first marathon in 2005. That's OK. At some point all of us will run out of time.
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