Concord, Massachusetts!

Friends squeezed into a replica of Thoreau's cabin near Walden Pond.

I am enamored with the town of  Concord, Massachusetts. I've been there at least five times, most recently last week when Drew and I met our good friends, Jim and Marian, for a halfway visit. Concord is halfway between their home in Waterbury, Connecticut and our condo in Portland, Maine. 







But as much as I enjoy the New England quaintness of present-day Concord, it's the town's PAST that draws me back time and time again. . . specifically its literary past. 

I often fantasize about popping back into Concord's history for a day, around the mid-1800s. The chances are good that as I walk down Lexington Road toward the town square, I'll find Nathaniel Hawthorne at his Wayside home, editing a short story; Louisa May Alcott a few houses down the road plotting her novel, Little Women; Ralph Waldo Emerson in his book-lined study, penning another essay. And Henry David Thoreau sauntering through the Concord woods, journal in hand.

Imagine – all these thinkers, writers and shapers of American culture were neighbors at various points in their lives! They dropped by each other's homes, shared meals, town gossip, and discussed issues as grand as the meaning of life and as everyday as the chance of snow. And they remain neighbors for all eternity, buried in family plots along Authors' Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Oh, the conversations they must have after the heavy, black gates are locked each evening. 

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As tempted as I am to immediately knock on Emerson, Alcott or Hawthorne's doors, I first choose to catch up with Thoreau – the subject of my *nightly reading for the last few weeks.

Perhaps I'll find him nosing around the Walden Pond cabin he lived in for two years, two weeks and two days (1845-47) . . . the site where thousands of Thoreau admirers, like myself, have journeyed to stand in what feels like sacred space.​

​Or more likely, he'd be perched on a rock, gazing at the pond's rippling water, doing what he professed so strongly – living in the present.
"What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods?" he wrote.

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Following the example of this unassuming man – who knows nothing of his immense influence on  future generations – I find a spot at water's edge, pull out my own journal and deliberately join him.


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*On my nightstand - Henry David Thoreau, A Life
by Laura Dassow Walls

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