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.

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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.

When I moved to western Wisconsin in 1993, I thought that the cities of La Crosse, Wisconsin and Rochester, Minnesota were similar to each other. La Crosse had two universities (which Rochester did not have), and Rochester had the Mayo Clinic, but otherwise the two communities had a lot in common. 

I would not make the same comparison today. Rochester has moved into the 21st Century, and La Crosse has not. In the past thirty years, Rochester has grown from 70,000 residents to over 120,000. La Crosse, over that same period of time, has had no reason to update the population numbers on its city limits signs.* La Crosse once ranked among the best small cities in America to live. Today it is listed as one of the most affordable. Affordability is another way of saying that property values have not changed much, which is another way of saying that La Crosse is stagnant.

Of course, growth and change for the sake of growth and change is not always for the best. If I was asked in which city I’d rather live, I’d take one look at my stretch of the Mississippi River only a mile from my house and choose La Crosse.

Just last month, a community-minded local resident bought and promised to maintain the character of La Crosse’s 158-year old mom and pop downtown hardware store. I am not someone who thinks that every old building and every old business deserves to be saved, but this was cause for celebration. I’ve always shopped at Kroner’s Hardware for nuts, bolts, and other small repair items, but when I learned that someone was making a commitment to keep this piece of La Crosse history open, I knew I had to increase my patronage.

I am comparing the two cities in this week’s blog because two Mondays ago I went to Rochester to shop. For several of my Asian American friends who live in La Crosse, a shopping trip to Rochester is a monthly event. Rochester has better Asian grocery stores than La Crosse. It has better Asian restaurants (although still not entirely authentic). It also has a Costco and a Trader Joe’s, two popular chainstores that have yet to make it to my city. I would rather stay home and drop hammers on my toes than drive for an hour to go shopping, but Manyu and I are still in a honeymoon phase after her four-month trip to Taiwan and Thailand. When she asked me to join her and two of our friends on a trip to Rochester, I agreed to go.

I have to admit that I like Trader Joe’s. I’ve been inside one only three times, but every time I’ve found the staff to be unusually friendly and cheerful. Manyu and our friend Shu each bought a big stack of Trader Joe’s canvas tote bags. Manyu is from Taiwan, Shu is from Mainland China, and Trader Joe’s bags are now a popular fashion accessory throughout Asia. The bags will make excellent gifts the next time either of them returns home to visit family. I didn’t buy any canvas bags, but I did get a bunch of bananas. When I went to pay for them, I was charged by the banana rather than by the pound. They sold for twenty-nine cents apiece, and I could not remember the last time I purchased anything that cost less than a dollar. It was probably the last time I bought a nut and a bolt at Kroner’s. 

The highlight of our trip was a stop at a trendy shoe store. Even though the store carried the largest selection of Birkenstocks I’ve ever seen, I didn’t buy anything. I did, however, step onto a futuristic-looking computerized machine that analyzes feet. The machine did not tell me anything that I didn’t already know (size 8.5 US, size 42 European, width EE, healthy arches), but it confirmed that all of the shoes that I’ve worn for the past fifty years have been the right size.

• In fairness to La Crosse, the city is boxed in on three sides by the river, the bluffs, and the city of Onalaska, so it cannot expand in those directions, That, however, is almost irrelevant, as the demand for growth is minimal.