I recently watched the new PBS series about Henry David Thoreau. I did not learn much that I didn’t already know, but it got me to pick up my old copy of Walden. I own four copies of the book, three of them gifts from family members, but I always read from the same one. It contains my comments in the margins. A year ago the binding in that copy completely dried out, and the pages separated from the cover. Now if I am not careful, the guts of the book fall out, and I am left holding an empty shell in my hand. Twice now the pages have fallen to the floor, and it’s taken me several minutes to put everything back in order.
When I was in high school, I tried reading Walden three or four different times. I could never get past the first chapter about the price of nails and molasses. During my sophomore year of college, Walden was required reading for an American lit course, so I finally pushed through the “Economy” section and got to the good stuff. More accurately, the professor showed me that even Thoreau’s opening pages were good stuff if I didn’t get bogged down by the detailed account of his finances.
College forced me to read both Walden and A Sand County Almanac. If that alone did not make my four and a half years of college worthwhile, it at least justified a semester or two.
One thing I did learn from the PBS series is that Thoreau left Walden Pond and spent the next six years revising his manuscript. This coincides with his belief that “into a perfect work time does not enter.”* It also makes me feel a little better that my own writing moves at a snail’s pace. My goal is not to achieve “perfect work,” but I do try to make my writing as good as my skills allow – and that takes time.
* * *
Last autumn the City’s yard waste truck never came by to pick up the raked leaves I’d left on the curb. They remained under the snow most of the winter, but when we had an early snowmelt in February, I gathered them up and dumped them in my garden. Two weeks ago I bagged up those leaves and hauled them to the yard waste disposal site. It took two trips. I needed to get them out of the garden because they were covering a bed of strawberries and purple coneflowers. These perennials needed direct sunlight as soon as the ground thawed, and I was worried that they would die if I didn’t take the leaves away.
I thought I’d timed my leaf removal efforts perfectly. The uncovered strawberries looked good, and a new season of coneflowers had just poked their heads out of the ground. In only two days of warm temperatures, the sun-loving coneflowers grew a full inch. Then rabbits, at least I think it was rabbits, ate them all. There is a fence around my garden, but like a cheap padlock, it only keeps out thieves who don’t try to get in.
The damage to my garden coincided with my rereading of Walden, so I jumped ahead to “The Beanfield” chapter to see what Thoreau had to say about varmints in his garden (“varmints” is my term, not Thoreau’s). His problem had been with woodchucks not rabbits, but the results were similar. Woodchucks had eaten a quarter of Thoreau’s bean crop. He concluded that he had no right to complain when he was the one who had removed their native food source and replaced it with beans.
I’ve always shared my tomatoes and berries with the rabbits, the squirrels, and the birds, but this time they went after the flowers. I am hoping that the coneflower’s roots have the reserve energy to send up a second set of shoots.
* From the “Conclusion” of Walden, only a few paragraphs from the “different drummer” quote.
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