From Henry David Thoreau's diary, edited by Damion Searls (NYRB, 2009):

July 6, 1845

I wish to meet the facts of life--the vital facts, which are the phenomena or actuality the gods meant to show us--face to face, so I came down here. Life! who knows what it is, what it does? If I am not quite right here, I am less wrong than before . . .

May 6, 1853

The whole landscape is many shades greener for the rain, almost a blue green.

In 2010 I spent my birthday with friends in Concord and visited the cemetery where Thoreau, Emerson, and Alcott are buried. My birthday, May 6, is Thoreau's death day. At his grave I recorded the birdsong in a canopy of green; I left a poem folded like a paper plane on Emerson's stone. When I was a girl growing up in Boston, I loved Little Women and spent an endless amount of time wondering whether I was more like oldest sister Meg or self-sacrificing Beth--New England homebodies. I couldn't imagine, then, that I would ever be as independent and adventurous as writer Jo or artist Amy. 




                                                            * "The language of birds . . . "--quoting W. H. Auden