The Streets of Olde Salem

My footsteps echoed the echoes of Time as through the streets of Salem I walked. The hour was early and the city still asleep with only a cat sitting quietly on a cold granite sill, the sky slowly turning from night into dawn, my mind still in twilight as my footsteps echoed on. The Ropes Mansion looked proud as I strolled Essex Street, its pediments and roof balustrades all stately, its fence posts freshly painted and hydrangea all in bloom. I faintly heard voices of a long-ago family gathered about the hearth in its fine parlor room. I passed the Athenaeum and hailed this library noble, so renowned its soaring columns and arched doorway have welcomed countless seekers of knowledge and those sharing the wisdom of learning and the comfort of reading from volumes well-bound. Ten generations of Pickerings have lived in the 1660 house situated on 18 Broad. A descendant, Timothy Pickering under George Washington had served and witnessed the surrender of Cornwallis’ sword. I admired the house’s gables, its unique fence and its posts then journeyed along to find more of Olde Salem’s ghosts. At the Broad Street Cemetery just steps across the street I tipped my hat to those who once lived here now in honest sleep at the second oldest resting place in Salem Town. But I shook my head over the grave of High Sheriff Corwin of the Witchcraft Trial beneath his time-weathered obelisk he must be tossing for all Eternity in his dank unholy ground. For the true ghosts of Olde Salem haunt the air of Proctor’s Ledge where 19 innocents all swung in the 1692 breeze and it was there at the edge of this hillside they died overlooking a town where too many had been tried. How real was their torture how sad was their pain and in their lonely silence do they relive it all again? And when it all was over, all said and all done Salem would feel cursed for its unforgivable deeds that could not be undone, for as I walk the streets of Olde Salem in the still-early morn, I see their spirits all around me along these sidewalks old and worn. Copyright 2020 Gregory Joseph Firlotte