I experienced another delightful walk with my friend on Monday, this time at the Tompson Street Reservation, around the corner from my house in West Gloucester. I was looking for somewhere nearby for this walking adventure, and I'm so glad that Google pointed me in this direction. I printed a PDF of the trail map and decided to try parking near Mount Jacob Cemetery and walking up Sunset Mountain. Not even a five minute drive from my house, we arrived at the cemetery but did not see any obvious space for parking so we drove a bit further down the road and found a good spot off the street. Since we weren't starting at the cemetery, we had to look for our originally chosen path to Sunset Mountain from some unmarked trails. We embarked on our journey and made it to what we thought was Sunset Mountain. It had a great view of the forest around us, and a big boulder on which someone had spray painted "Save the Bees." We had gotten there in no time, so we continued our journey, meandering our way through the woods, and eventually found ourselves on an even higher peak which turned out to actually be Sunset Mountain, and it was absolutely stunningly gorgeous. You could see a huge stretch of route 128, the windmills in downtown Gloucester, and ocean in the direction of Ipswich/Plum Island. I was shocked by the beauty of this view, and could have stayed staring at it for hours. It continues to amaze me that this is where I live; this hidden gem is practically in my backyard.
We then found our way back to the trail that we had originally intended on taking and ended up in the cemetery...which turns out to be a Jewish cemetery. The headstones were all in Hebrew and were ornately and intricately designed. It is quiet and secluded, in-tune with its woodland setting. We found the stone for Jacob, for whom the cemetery was dedicated and named after in 1913. One headstone was carved to be a large tree trunk; one was the shape of a heart. They were all beautiful and I loved seeing the Hebrew writing. It was a delight to find yet another hidden gem in my neighborhood, and we both look forward to going back and exploring all the other trails in the reservation.
One other thing I want to make a note of, mostly so I can remember it, is something my friend asked me during our walk. I mentioned that I had a dream about us taking this walk and working on a project afterwards and started describing some of its more hilarious parts. She asked me, "What title would you give to this dream?" which I thought was a fascinating question and really got me thinking about the dream differently, in a more wholistic manner. She says that's one of the questions people who work on dreams always asks. And I can totally see why. I want to give all my dreams titles now, as a way to summarize them and remember them. By the way, I decided to title this dream "Overcomplications" because everything in the dream was so completely overcomplicated, convoluted, and ridiculous. Interestingly, this revelation helped us with our project later-- we are designing a labyrinth, but received the wrong materials to build it. Instead of overcomplicating things by only building half of it and waiting for the new materials to "hopefully" arrive in time for us to build the other half, we rolled with what we were given, and made a labyrinth that was smaller and not as complex as originally designed, yet it will be just as effective. So my dream, and my chosen title, reminded us to keep it simple!
With delight,
♥Jamie
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