To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if
possible, Nature herself! . . . So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express!
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully . . .
I love this charming passage from Thoreau’s Walden. I, too, inspect snow storms, dawns, dusks and autumn days. Recently, the dawn sky was striated with bands of clouds of pink like the inside of a shell that tinged the snow a faint pink, and down near the line of the horizon the rising sun flamed the sky.
Underneath the oak tree, some of whose branches touched the ground under the snow’s weight, squirrels with tails thrown up over their backs as overcoats mined the snow for acorns. One alpha squirrel spent the days under the feeder. A coterie of our “peckaries” — several cardinals, doves, juncos, blue jays, sparrows and a red-breasted finch — competed for space on the feeder or pecked for seeds in the snow. I use the possessive pronoun “our” because we feel responsible for the birds that we feed.
Alas, nature often has another side. The heavy snow caused a section of a large cherry tree that gardener Bill planted twenty years ago to break away from the trunk. The lovely tree will be mutilated, or it may have to be cut down.
It may appear that I’ve abandoned the theme of being appless in Indianapolis because I don’t use an iPhone. Not so. Sometimes seemingly disparate ideas run simultaneously on my mental tape recorder. While I was holed up in our cozy home, cooking comfort soups such as turkey and rice and ham and beans while watching the scene outside, I was thinking about how simple my life is compared with that of up-to-date and technologically savvy people.
Thoreau’s mantra was “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” I feel as if I’m a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, waking up in a world that has become so complex that I shall never catch up with its cultural and generational shift. I’m so old fashioned that I use a use a yellow tablet for my to-do lists and write down dates on a calendar. Everyone else, it seems, has fancy telephones such as Blackberries or iPhones with “apps.” Apps? What in the world are apps? Actually, I know that this is short for applications.
There are thousands of apps that enable people to use their phones to manage their lives, access information, find restaurants, make reservations, check out the sales at stores, bank checks, play games, pull up real estate listings, order and pay for items, and so on ad infinitum. You just touch an icon representing the appropriate task, and presto the desired information appears. Vicki says that she can even read my column on her iPhone.
And just imagine taking pictures with your telephone — of all things! People just sort of aim their telephones and snap away. Vicki explained that you can take pictures with your phone, press the film roll icon and select pictures to share with people who use Facebook.
Sometimes I wonder if people just aim randomly and click at snippets of life the way they take pictures with their phones. Even though I use a Kindle, the Internet, e-mail and write on a powerful laptop, my mindset is probably closer to that of Thoreau who presumably wrote with a pencil. I try to live deep, as he advised. Perhaps others live more broadly and experience wonders that I cannot. It’s not that I’m unwilling, but I have learned that my life’s “apps” are finite. It’s a matter of time and choice, and I choose to live closer to nature and watch sunrises and my birdies. wclarke@comcast.net