One point two miles into my
run, I arrive at the Rodin sculpture. Every time I run by it, I wonder how it
came to be there. Though I don’t typically stop, Rodin and his beautiful piece of art stay in my mind long after I’ve run by.
I wonder, who were Elizabeth
Musgrave Merrill and her daughter Sally Hicks Croswell, who’s remains lie
beneath the gorgeous sculpture of a mother holding her child? How did it come
to be that Auguste Rodin would sculpt a gravestone for the Merrill family in
Middleburg, Virginia?
The cemetery becomes my own
private Musée Rodin, taking me back to such a special place in Paris. I recall trips
to the Rodin Garden, and the quiet happiness I have felt there, surrounded by sculptures
and manicured hedges and lawns, offering stone solitude in a huge city filled
with joie de vivre, the joy of life.
As I run on through the Middleburg
cemetery, as well a respite from a bustling village, the gravestones become
beautiful sculptures in their own right. As I run up a small rise, there are
Civil War gravestones set in a circle surrounding a monument, there are horses
and a dragon, and sculptures of small creatures alongside more traditional
headstones, many of which show faded sentiments of loved ones young and old.
I loop through the inside of an
iron gated fence and then again along the outside of the fence, beside the
lake, always noticing gravestones that I had not seen the week before, completing my quiet ritual as I run along reading the
names of the dead.
It doesn’t take religion or a
belief in afterlife to feel the souls of the dead. Though some might say
feeling the souls of the dead automatically qualifies a person as having such a
custom or belief. Perhaps it’s the history that I feel. Perhaps it’s the beauty
and quiet of the cemetery. There’s a feeling of comfort here, which makes no
conscious sense as the idea of placing bodies in the ground offers no solace to
me from a practical standpoint.
I run alone, and when I enter
the cemetery I find myself looking for the familiar graves, of “people” I now
know by name. It is a sculpture garden, with each sculpture featuring the soul
of a person long gone but able to be honored as I run by. I wonder about the
level of respect, or lack thereof, a person shows by running through a
cemetery. I’ve come to the conclusion that because it’s a meditation of sorts
for me, that hopefully it’s the former.
Just outside the main gate, I
turn left and run along a stone wall on Federal Street. On the backside, a row
of gravestones are embedded into the wall.
They stand close together, lined up as sentinels facing the church,
which was founded in 1847. Too many gravestones
to count, I run by thinking of them as a group, though I don’t know who they
were or how the wall and graves have now become interlocked. I run back into
the village, back into the world of the living, leaving the Rodin and the Civil
War soldiers and the animal sculptures and all of the others, and I feel the peace of
knowing that they’ll be waiting for me to visit them again on my next run.
