Spring 2007

I see that my last blog appeared after the big snow fall in early March. I speak today from the midst of Spring and daylight savings time. Walden is, indeed, melting apace.

How the word doth turn!

Thoreau speaks gloriously of the thawing of the earth in the Spring. He notes the myriad rivulets formed in the hillside from the melting snows running to their sources, and from the oozings of the frost from the earth. Thoreau acknowledges that this phenomenon is “somewhat excrementitious . . . and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels . . . but this suggests that Nature at least has some bowels.” In New York I did all that I could to avoid stepping into the product of the bowels which littered the streets, but somehow here I celebrate the muck. I have wonderful boots which transport me clean footed and dry between office and home. Walden is melting apace . . . Walden was dead and is alive again.

By the way, I think Thoreau made up that word, excrementitious. Or at least, I hope he did. I love when he does that.

No doubt, it will get cold again, but I think we have once again survived winter. We are stronger.