Last week I posted a poem I entered into an International Peace Day themed contest (you can vote for it here!) I mentioned in that post that my poem was partially inspired by a walk through a cemetery adjacent to a nature park. The cemetery was Evergreen Cemetery, right next to Evergreen Park. Evergreen Park is small, but serene, and one of its paths joins the walkways in the cemetery. This may sound strange, but I actually like walking through cemeteries. When I was in grade school, I went on numerous field trips to the old graveyards in my small Massachusetts hometown. We noted the years and months during which people died, identified life spans by looking at the dates on head stones and then coming up with averages, and noted who was buried with family, and who was not. My favorite part was taking rubbings of the artwork on the headstones, and looking up the symbolism of different images later. All of this was an effort to teach us how history is studied, the …