I’ve been meaning to re-visit May Sarton’s grave in nearby Nelson, NH but haven’t been back since I first photographed it a little over a year ago. As I explained then, I feel a strong sentimental connection with Sarton after having read and deeply resonated with her published journals over the years. As a divorced woman writer living on my own (and blogging bits of my private life) here in New Hampshire, I continue to consider Sarton one of my deepest inspirations: another solitary soul who saw the written word as being the most accurate means of communicating her true self.

I’m a sucker for cemeteries and feel particularly sentimental about the graves of authors I admire. Although I haven’t been back to Willa Cather’s resting place in Jaffrey, NH since I first visited in July, 2004, I feel an inexplicable sense of groundedness knowing that Cather’s remains are nearby…and the mountain she so loved to contemplate during summer stints in New Hampshire still looms over my shoulder, Dame Monadnock being another of my grounding inspirations.

And although humble Henry David Thoreau lies buried a state away from me in Concord, MA, I get a little emotional (forgive me) when I remember that he himself once walked Keene streets, remarking during a stop on his way to Canada in 1850 that our own Main Street “strikes the traveller favorably, it is so wide, level, straight, and long.” Thoreau’s mother was born in Keene, where she lived in a house along the Main Street her son would someday admire and immortalize; is it any wonder that I feel a more-than-merely-literary connection with Thoreau and feel a bit sentimental about his grave, too?

Someday we’ll all find our own resting places whether famous or forgotten. In the meantime, I get a bit emotional knowing that three authors who have inspired my own writing–three authors who are long gone but whose words still resonate in my heart–lie within an easy drive of my humble abode here in Keene. We’re never alone, I think, if we’re surrounded by great ones and the ones who inspire us to greatness. That might sound a bit cheesy…or maybe it’s just me being Sentimental.