New Year's Day 2010

How did you spend this New Year's Day? When I called my mom this morning, she suggested, knowing I'd been cooped up indoors for most of the past week with this darned cold, that I should go out for a walk. Great idea, especially since I plan to be more active in 2010, but ...it's winter...and it was snowing, just a bit. Knowing it was only minus 10C with the windchill today and if the forecast is true, it's meant to be minus 22 tomorrow (eek), I figured if I was going out, it was going to be today. So I bundled up and headed out. Not too many people out and about as you can see from my footprints in the snow and only about the 10th person I saw wished me a Happy New Year, although a few said hello.

I decided to walk to a nearby cemetery I've driven past several times but never visited. I knew I wanted to go with my camera in hand. It's called the Stonehouse Burying Grounds and dates back to 1845. There are only a handful of headstones, a couple are broken and leaning against a tree, one is seriously tilted and all of them are surrounded by a padlocked chain fence, which I did not attempt to climb in my long winter coat (although I did notice the ground is raised quite a bit at the rear of the cemetery and the fence would be quite easy to jump at that point...).

The tilted headstone has this lovely poem carved on the back:

The stars may fall, the sun decay
The Earth's whole fabric waver
But firm as heaven my love shall stay
Unquenched, unceasing never.

(a Google search revealed this may have been a song written by someone named Montague but as there was only one reference, we can't be sure).

I thought that was a romantic way to start the New Year, with a tale of unwavering love, don't you think?