I Went to the Woods...

“I went to the woods to live deliberately...” That's Henry David Thoreau in the opening pages of Walden, the little book he wrote after two years of living in the cabin he built on the shores of Walden Pond, just two miles from the town of Concord where Nathaniel Hawthorne briefly lived. Where Bronson Alcott lived too, with his high-minded ways and raised up the dark-eyed talented Louisa. Where, most of all in my mind anyway, Ralph Waldo Emerson lived, with his big nose and his kind face; Emerson, who helped support his far younger friend Henry, lending him the use of that patch of land by the pond, and even taking him into his house to live with his family and tutor his children..Around these parts we all know Walden Pond over there in Concord.I know it's just ten miles from my house. I know it was formed by the retreating glacier a mere 10 or 12 thousand years ago. I know, or learned much later, it's the place where my teen children went night-swimming with their pals behind all our backs and all in defiance of many laws.I have read Thoreau’s Walden so many times that the things he says there and facts of his life come constantly into my mind, and I wonder always how he managed after losing his brother to John to lockjaw. It was about their trip down the Concord and Merrimack rivers that he was trying to write when he lived in that little cabin. I always assumed he was trying to bring his brother close again in the writing, as I have been trying to do with my sister Nan who, much to my dismay, moved to faraway Florida in the late '70s and has been there ever since.This week my man and I are away from our house that lies so close to Concord. Life chugs along without us there however, since four adults and an infant are living with us this summer - which means that I the worrier am free from worry over who will bring in the mail and papers. Free from worry over what lights we’ll leave on to fool those robbers in their cartoon robber-masks who we somehow picture making their nightly rounds, trying doors, as faithful as lamplighters of old ....This week I'm free from all such worry. Free to hike and swim and read Walden in these soft New Hampshire hills, where we mean to spend our time.Here’s something I read there just now, upon rising from my bed:

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Food for thought all right. I wonder: should it be crisp broccoli, rich butternut squash and good dark beans for our supper tonight?

What The Babies Are Doing Really

Babies make simpletons of us all, even of old Ralph Waldo Emerson, who I fell in love with all over again yesterday morning on reading what he had to say about his own little ones.

It's funny because you think of Emerson as this very grave man, with his  great nose and his sad wise eyes and those sloping shoulders you see in every portrait and bust ever done of him;  but when he brought that careful attention to his babies’ doings, something so delightful emerges, I just had to jot some of it down here.

For example, he recorded that at four months old  his baby “studies Manipulation, and Palmistry and Optics.”

Wh-a-a-a- at? I thought at first – until I realized that of course! Those are exactly the topics all babies are puzzling about on first coming awake in the world.

Optics: 'Well it’s certainly much brighter here than it was in my old apartment and things appear to be more 'layered'. I mean here’s my terrycloth bunny that seems much larger than that that chest of drawers over there. Yet the chest holds all my clothes!'

Manipulation: 'And what are these two waving appendages that go wherever I go and can I get either one of them into my mouth?'"

Palmistry: 'Ah yes, here's one now, right near my mouth and almost in it, a knotty-appearing  thing that opens and closes like a day lily with five smaller and more wiggly appendages attached. Hmmmm.'

A few years later when a little sister came to Emerson and his wife, he wrote that she “slept incessantly - hands up, as for defense.”

Later, as she was learning to walk he wrote of “little balancing Nelly, moving with forthspread arms and smelling as delicious as a cake pan."

Delicious as a cake pan:  I love that. I love that he said his little son was " as handsome as Walden Pond at sunrise."

And I really love that I live just 20 minutes from Walden Pond and drove past it at 7 last night - past its deep waters, and the  exiting pilgrims who had come to see where Emerson’s great friend Thoreau built his cabin and lived deliberately; past the train tracks whose shuttling commerce back and forth from Cambridge to Fitchburg at first so alarmed the denizens of sleepy Concord.

I was returning from a family event where our own new baby herself kept busy studying Manipulation and Palmistry and  Optics. I felt so glad of my morning reading, which let me look at this first granddaughter with a whole new set of eyes, and isn’t that what a good writer does for us every time.

Maybe little Callie will write one day herself. What fun to see if what SHE has to say! What fun to learn of any new person's 'take' on the world !