Prospect Hill

The first four of my "Seven hills in seven days" took me to the west (Higby Mountain and Lamentation Mountain), to the south (Round Hill), and to the East (Bear Hill).  Today I wanted to summit a hill in the north of Middletown. I found one on a topo map which seemed perfect: in the North End, near a cemetery, and most importantly on a busy work day not too far away.  Prospect Hill is just west of Prospect Street, which is almost the western border of the North End residential area. I biked there and discovered that the map was not quite accurate, the actual top of the hill is almost certainly right on Prospect Street. Thus, this became my second bicycle ascent of a Middletown hill.  Prospect Hill, like all the others except for Round Hill, is actually somewhat of a ridge. To the east it slopes gradually down to Main Street and the Connecticut River, to the West it drops very steeply down to the Coginchaug River.  The Prospect Hill ridge is bisected by the deep cut for the railroad tracks, which curve here towards the river.  

I continued north along Prospect Street to the St. John's Cemetery.  This is a small cemetery and mausoleum, housing about a hundred people whose lives mostly spanned from about 1900 to 1985.  The grave markers are flush with the ground, giving an impression of modest people who lived practical lives.  The roster of names included many familiar ones, important families during the years after the big wave of European immigrants at the end of the 19th century, names like Coleman, Marino, Milardo, Kidney, Footit.  

When I was bicycling around the North End, I passed a car on jacks with one man working on the brakes, and another man and a woman leaning against the car, smoking and chatting. When the woman saw me, she said in a very loud voice (it sounded like a shout to me), "Look at that guy on the bike, he bikes around everywhere. I mean it, no matter where I go, there he is."  I laughed and turned around to reply, but she was turned away to chat with her friends.  I don't know if she thought I couldn't understand the language, or if she thought I couldn't hear her shout, but I felt a little bit like a funny-looking lemur whom the tourists assume cannot understand things that are said about him.