Tag Archives: Thoreau

In Praise of Small Houses

In the early 21st century, when I was hospitalized for an unidentified illness, which manifested such symptoms as necrosis, Clonus, and hallucinations, the team of doctors, who were experts in their fields, comforted me with humor and optimism. 

“Trial and error,” one said cheerfully.  “I feel we’re getting close.”

“Closer and closer,” said another. 

That was a Paul McCartney song.

“This might be your lucky day.” My favorite doctor handed me a Chinese fortune cookie that said “It’s your lucky day.”.

I still have that fortune. It is in my lucky blue jar, a blue ceramic jar with a bird flying off the lid.

The next day he told me,  “f you were a horse, I’d bet on you.”

“I’m a tired horse right now.”

“Bet you $5 you won’t go downstairs to the cafeteria in your pajamas.”

“Bet’s on, Cookie, dear!” I called him Cookie because of the fortune cookie. I did feel ridiculous in the cafeteria, but I went down in my jams, pink robe and slippers.

And then one day I woke up and was completely well.  No one knew how or why.  The doctors said some cases were like that: they experimented with drug cocktails until they found  the right one. Cookie gave me a pack of peanut M&Ms:  “I know they’re your favorite.”

While I was lying in bed I finally stayed up long enough to read Thoreau. Thoreau was the ultimate downsizer, and I was thinking about downsizing. I imagined us leaving our big, rambling house in a dicey neighborhood plagued by “white flight” to live in a smaller house in a safer neighborhood.

I don’t mean I wanted to live in a shack like Thoreau, but I thought in a smaller house we would live closer together and take up less space.  We would live more simply; we would ultimately be happier. Perhaps I was thinking like Bronson Alcott, the impractical Transcendentalist dreamer who started a vegetarian commune and forgot to plant vegetables. I sincerely hope I am more like his daughter, Louisa May, who wrote a satire of the commune, Transcendental Wild Oats.

Eventually we found a house. It’s not a tiny house, mind, it’s just small, and there are trees in the backyard, and one started out as a weed tree and grew into a tall walnut tree. Our house might be a Sears Roebuck house, or so a carpenter told us. From 1908 to 1942, Sears sold house kits that came with blueprints and the materials to build the house. 

Sometimes we feel cooped-up here in winter. It’s small, it’s too cold to sit on the porch, there’s too much ice on the sidewalk, he wants to watch sports, I would prefer a rom-com – you know how it goes.  But overall, I think it’s better for the soul, it’s a better way to know the truth, it’s a charm against the competitive trampling that goes on in our society, and a way to live without chasing down the dream of a suburban mansion with a turret, a tower (I want that), two porches (I want those), a gazebo, a billiards room, a library (I want that), several boudoirs, and the mysterious three garages. 

Notes from the Woods: What Do You Do When Your Friends Hate Thoreau?

Many years ago, when I lived in a gray polluted city in the Rust Belt, I was startled to learn that people hated Thoreau.

Mind you, my closest friend was a poet with a degree in philosophy who was as enraptured by Thoreau as I was. We loved the idea of living in tune with nature and enjoyed walks in the woods. On a camping trip, we learned that we loved trees but feared ticks and wildlife. A scary raccoon, who did not look like a Disney character, wandered into our camp. We also learned that no amount of Off! can keep the mosquitoes away. 

But our weak camping talents aside, Thoreau made us see the world differently.  You can turn to almost any page in Walden and take inspiration.  Here’s one of my favorites.

 This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.  As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, and though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me.

Now that it’s spring, I plan to take some evening walks. Thank you, Thoreau, for the inspiration.

But some of my non-poetic citified friends hated Thoreau. One day, I happened to mention my love of Walden to a charming posh friend over lunch.

She fumed. “What a hypocrite that guy was!  If he’d had to really live in the woods, he wouldn’t have lasted a day.  His mother did his laundry, and he came home for dinner.”   

“Well, I never heard anything about his laundry, but he did live in the woods!”  I said, laughing. “And he’s such a great writer.”

Captain Nemo has a correction to make about the laundry. “More likely it was Emerson’s wife who did his laundry!”

On another occasion, my friend and I stopped in Concord because she wanted to tour Louisa May Alcott’s house.  I would have loved to visit Walden Pond as well, and perhaps Emerson’s house, if it’s still there, but decided it was best not to mention the Transcendentalists, who were essentially radical 19th-century hippies. (It turned out my friend was a Republican, so I can only suppose Thoreau was a threat to the economy.)

Another of my friends, a devout Methodist stay-at-home mom, who spent most of her time supervising her children’s homework and writing their papers, completely lost it when I mentioned Thoreau.  She, too, was upset about Thoreau’s laundry!

This must be one of those bizarre complaints that get passed down from female generation to female generation of non-Thoreau fans. If I lived in the woods, damned straight I’d take my laundry to Mom.

Anyway, I recommend an excellent new PBS documentary about Thoreau. This film may send you back to the books, and may even give you strength to cope with the modern world.

No, Really, You Want to Read about Nature!

If you’re in holiday despair, if your industrial-farm turkey didn’t roast properly (the chemicals make it rubbery), if you got the wrong kind of cranberry sauce, there is only one solution:  go live in the woods.

The good news:  Henry David Thoreau did it first.  He lived simply in his cabin by Walden Pond.  “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion,” he writes in Walden.  That seemed profound when I was a young woman.

Nowadays, sitting on a pumpkin sounds very Cinderella.  Was her coach a pumpkin?  I honestly can’t remember.  But sitting on a pumpkin sounds uncomfortable.  How large was this pumpkin?  Did it come in small, medium, and large?  Could you put a velvet cushion on top?

There is a lagoon not far from us, but it is not Walden pond.  It is murky and weedy, and the ducks live there, and if they can, I can.  Except for one thing:  what would my source of drinking water be?  And there you’d be, ice-fishing at the lagoon, and the hikers would give you money, because they’d think you’re a homeless person living in a tent by the lagoon, and they might kindly tell you that there are no fish in the lagoon.

If you pretend to be Thoreau, as opposed to Cinderella, many will condemn you as a social misfit. It’s one thing to go to the ball in a magic pumpkin and enchant a prince-husband, but it’s another to escape the trappings of capitalist society and live off the land, i.e., the lagoon.

On a different note, I recommend Conrad Richter’s 1953 novel, The Light in the Forest, a compassionate novel about a young white boy, raised happily by Indians (Indigenous people) after being captured as a child.  He is very close to his Indian family, but his life is ripped apart when a British edict declares that the Indians must return the captives to their white families.  The story is touching, and very sympathetic to Indigenous culture.  Is it right to take the boy away from his family and culture twice?

Another great book for nature lovers is Louise Rich’s We Took to the Woods (1942), a chronicle of her family’s life in a rickety house – actually a former fishing camp – in the woods in Maine.  Rich takes each season as it comes.  In winter, she and her family are cut off from town for months because of the snow. They stock up on canned goods, chop wood, garden, fish, occasionally hunt game, and attempt to train their affectionate huskies to pull a dog sled.

Here’s an excerpt from We Took to the Woods:

Winter, to look forward to, is a long, dark, dreary time. To live, it’s a time of swirling blizzards and heavenly high blue and white days; of bitter cold and sudden thaws; of hard work outdoors and long, lamp-lit evenings; of frost patterns on the windows and the patterns of deer tracks in the snow. It’s the time you expected to drag intolerably, and once in a while you stop and wonder when the drag is going to begin. Next week, you warn yourself, after we’ve finished doing this job on hand, we’d better be prepared for a siege of boredom. But somehow next week never comes. There’s always something to keep it at bay.

Winter is just starting here. Snow is predicted for tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of your holiday!