Thoreau Farm

By Corinne H. Smith

“Spring.” What an appropriate word! Over the past few weeks, all sorts of unexpected plants have begun to spring up in our yard. Unfortunately, some of them pose more questions than they answer.

When we moved to this property in December, the landscape was brown. All of the plants had been cleared out or trimmed close before our arrival. Now a few colorful hyacinths and daffodils dot our borders. Obviously somebody planted them on the west side of the house and along the back edge of the yard. But why are a few also blooming in the two-foot-by-two-foot plot between the two equipment sheds? Who will ever see them, besides the next-door neighbors and the skunk who trots through here every night? I may need to move them when the petals are gone.

All winter long, I stared out of the living room window at an empty dirt patch that lay under a tree in the front yard. I couldn’t wait for the chance to sprinkle grass seed there. But before I could get to the hardware store, fresh shoots of hostas began to emerge from the soil. I was both annoyed and overjoyed at the sight. Annoyed, because I had hoped to “make the earth say grass” at that spot, to paraphrase Mr. Thoreau. But since I had also planned to line the front edge of the house with a row of hostas, I was grateful. I didn’t need to buy any new ones at all. I just dug these up and transplanted them. They already seem happier in their new locations.

In the meantime, still more greenery has followed the hostas into what I thought had been a barren space. I don’t recognize them yet. But I’ve decided not to mow them.

Two parallel rows of peony bushes have made themselves known in the back yard. Whether they’ll end up showing us pink or white blossoms is anybody’s guess. That’s another section that I’ll have to pay attention to, whenever I’m mowing. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll do with the burgeoning carpet of the lily of the valley plants that have spilled over from their original bed. They may get cut.

My Midwestern friends should be pleased to know that I have diligently pulled out – with their roots intact – every sprig of garlic mustard that I’ve seen on the property. People in the Northeast don’t seem to be as concerned about this invasive species as residents in the Midwest are, I’ve learned. But I can’t escape my prairieland training. Out they’ve come.

Thoreau once wrote in his journal, “The humblest weed is indescribably beautiful.” (January 11, 1854) Well then, Henry would deem our lawn to be unbelievably stunning. It’s full of all kinds of tiny flowering plants. Grass is a threatened minority, and the overall color is more purple-blue than green. We’ve got violets and creeping Charlie galore, along with the occasional stray sprays of grape hyacinth. Then there are small anonymous white buds and yellow buttercups that add more botanical frosting to the cake. Fortunately, none of them seems to mind very much when the mower passes over. I transplanted some, but I can’t catch them all.

Backyard Surprises

It’s difficult to remember the drab grays and browns of winter, now that there’s so much color surrounding us. Yes, Henry, I agree with you that the weeds are beautiful. But I’m daily reminded of the words of another sage: TV’s Gomer Pyle, as played by Jim Nabors. It never took too much prompting for ol’ Gome to shriek, “Surprise, Surprise, Surprise!” I mimic him almost every day.

Amid all the recent tumult and speculation, it seems a good week to risk some contemplative thought, a quiet entry really. I’m brought to it by a passage from Thoreau’s Journal in April, 1854. Amid all the observations of pollinating plants, returning birds and first flowers (which reminds me of the current exhibition, (Early Spring: Henry Thoreau and Climate Change,) at The Concord Museum (see link below and more about this exhibit after I’ve visited), Thoreau is watching himself closely too. Not long before this date, he received the proofs for Walden, which will be published that summer, and here and there, we get glimpses of his passage through its pages.

Here’s one from April 8th: “I find that I can criticize my composition best when I stand at a little distance from it, — when I do not see it, for instance. I make a little chapter of contents which enables me to recall it page by page to my mind, and judge it more impartially when my manuscript is out of the way. The distraction of surveying enables me to take new points of view. A day or two surveying is equal to a journey.”

Ah, I say to myself, there’s the doublemeaning man of whom I’m so fond – the “distraction of surveying” is a wonderful phrase. Yes, he is away from the pages of Walden, and surveying’s measurements are surely distracting from the line-by-line review of what he has written. But only a mind as alive as Thoreau’s could see distraction in the exact angles of divvying land and imagining immaculate lines upon it. After a long day of snapping lines across the landscape, Thoreau seems freshly able to see his own lines of prose amid his book’s geography. To be distracted and so refreshed by close observation seems actually to be Thoreau’s method…of discovery…of living.

Here, from a day earlier is this observation: On the Cliff I find, after long and careful search, one sedge above the rocks, low amid the withered blades of last year, out, its little yellow beard amid the dry blades and a few green ones – the first herbaceous flowering I have detected.

Sedge in Sun

A day or two of such surveying “at a little distance,” yielding, among other sights, “the little yellow beard amid the dry blades,” surely is “equal to a journey.” Are we not fresh-eyed when we return from our journey, having examined, say, the rough corrugation of a white pine or the torpid pose of a water snake waiting for the sun’s crawl to reach him? Do we not see more when we bend to survey our everyday words and work?

May we all “survey” and “journey” so.

The Concord Museum Exhibition Link:http://www.concordmuseum.org/concord-museum-early-spring-exhibition.php

Late afternoon and the gray, pillowed sky and gusting wind say there’s a cold front on the way. But as I walk to the river and its trails, the temps are in the low 70s, and the wind has no teeth. On this edgy day, with school cancelled and the extended city of Boston locked down, I need the air and the motion of walking.

It turns out that I also need the marsh marigolds that cluster newly blossomed on the bank of the flood plain; I need too the red-tail that drops from a white pine directly above near the trail’s beginning; his wing span as he glides over a small field is broad enough to summon comparison, and as I seek it, looking up into his white underside and fan of red at the tail, I see the thumb-sized, brilliant yellow shape of the first goldfinch. The hawk is gone; I walk out along the berm of the old railroad right of way, aimed for the breach that lets the river through.

But despite this wild-gilded entrance, my walk will not be about the riverine world. I carry with me the album of images from the past few days – mayhem in Copley Square, people scattering, and then the frozen likenesses of those sought for the bombings and those seeking them. And then there are the backstories, including the banal and eerie tweets from the man who began his news cycle as Suspect #2, his dark hair swelling from beneath a backwards, white ballcap.

Henry Thoreau thought a walk spoiled when he couldn’t outpace the town and its news, when his mind couldn’t shed them, and I suppose my walk can now be classed “spoiled.” But here amid the pines and oaks and along the blackwater river, I can exhale…My thoughts begin to arrive singly rather than as the bunched jumble of a website. I am wondering about announcement, about how we announce ourselves.

All announcement is imposition of some sort, even as it seeks linkage and affirmation with like others. A few birds are singing in this deep wood, announcing both territory and presence; it is both warning and invitation. If, as seems likely to me as I walk, some fanaticism lies behind these announcement-bombs, I wonder how the conviction took hold and deepened to the point where a whole unknown swath of people could become its aimpoints. How do people become so much the “other” that they are simply ways of announcing oneself…or one’s imagined divinity?

And then I begin to wonder about the odd, and, at times, hopeful experiment of having a country composed of immigrants, of forming a “we” from so many “others.” Surely, I think, as I turn along the far side of my loop and head back for the river, such a “we” avoids the problems of sameness, of monoculture of myopia. But amid the cacophony of announcement and the counter-currents of histories and beliefs what commonality do we sing?

In the floodplain the redwing blackbirds are squalling, and the sky has come lower and darker. They will nest; it will rain. I walk along slowly, almost slowly enough so that each step is singular. But at least there is space enough between my thoughts to count and consider them as I turn toward town, toward “we,”  where it’s clear I’ll face these thoughts again.