"You will get very little from Walden if you read it hunting for contradictions, if you make a great fuss over the fact that he had dinner in town with friends sometimes. There is much to dispute with Thoreau, but the useful disagreements lie in the essentials, not the details."--- Bill McKibben, from an annotation for Walden.
In the opening chapter of Walden, Economy, Henry David Thoreau writes about buying an old cabin from James Collins and tearing it down, salvaging the pieces, and re-using them to build his house. Preservation and recycling, I tell my students that these ideas for many people in the twenty-first century are radial. Imagine what people thought of Thoreau in the nineteenth century!
My husband and I, while hardly card-carrying members of the Simplicity movement like several of our much-greener, less-materialistic friends, [See Striving for Happiness], The Cult of Home Ownership demands constant sacrifice, so we are trying to do more with less as the cliche and our checkbooks demand. Hence a flower and vegetable garden, beauty and function.
As I am currently teaching Thoreau, I see that we had followed his path in reclaiming something old for our new purpose.
The previous owners of our late-fifties/early sixties ranch house were definitely good, but apparently eccentric people who did wonderful things like knocking down interior walls to open up space, and weird things like trying to seal pipes of different materials with concrete (!) and producing a fuse box that is in a mysterious code.
The "lean-to" connected to our backyard storage shed was typical of the aesthetic and work ethic of the previous owners. By the time we got the house and a year more had passed, the lean-to had become a structure that looked tentative at best from the front, and actually looked more like an assertively shabby crack den from the side.
A few weeks ago we finally tore the lean-to down.
Once the lean-to was demolished and most of the leavings were hauled away (I had raised a post-feminist hand and stepped in to the sweaty labor), we were left with usable bricks, several good wood beams, and a "patio" shaped like one of those not-so-square-shaped Midwestern states. Odd but useful things.
In the not-so-useful category, we also dug up wire, glass, concrete blocks, metal pieces of some lost functions, and batteries, to name just a few of our "treasures." Andy said that turning this spot into a garden had become for him a humanitarian project. I, in turn, quoting Star Wars, alternated in calling it our "mercy mission" and "a damned fool idealistic crusade" in which we were armed with only gardening books, a debit card, and enthusiasm with which to fight.
Our "mission" was to use as much of the leavings from the lean-to that we could to incorporate into our garden--our little Walden. We cleaned off the patio, Andy lined it with bricks, set down the wood ties; we planted flowers and put in small-to-start beds--herbs in the front bed, vegetables in the back.
As you can see I think it turned out to be a quite beautiful little spot. At the end of the day when we admired our work arm-and-arm, I thought, this is what life is about: making something beautiful with someone you love that you have faith will last.
