As certainly as yellow creeps down the sides of the mountain where groves of aspens change daily, I feel my thoughts creeping away from the duty hours of looking for fires. Now I imagine distant adventures. For five years I’ve started 
winter by spending October in Maine in the small house my mother was born in. It belongs to me now and little old houses like to have regular attention paid to them.
The last two years I drove to Maine in my little Toyota truck. But driving along Route 66 this summer on a day off I whooped and rolled into R & A Import Auto to show Steve my odometer turning over 200,000! I thanked them for taking such good care of my truck’s fine four cylinders, but I feel less enthused about driving across country this year. Instead I’ll fly to Connecticut and meet my sister and we’ll drive eight hours north to eat “lobstah” together and savor clams and ooh at bronze and gold leaves and ocean blue.
We might pause for an adventure along the way. Once we made a small pilgrimage near Concord, Mass. An afternoon deluge of rain had just cleared the parking lot at the Walden Pond State Reservation. We donned raincoats and delighted in a misty walk to the site of the famous cabin Henry David Thoreau built. How nice to stand by the shore with a bit of the peace Henry savored. Other pilgrims have placed rocks on a pile by the monument stones that mark the site of the small cabin that has long since rotted away, or perhaps the boards were re-used by a thrifty farmer. Seems like something I could look up somewhere: the fate of the actual boards of 
Thoreau’s cabin.
In the Thoreau Society bookshop across the street I almost bought a T-shirt with these words on it: “I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” I picked up a keychain that said, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” Finally, I bought a patch with the cabin on it to sew on the cloth lunch pail I keep for picnicking in the woods. Outside I peered into a same size replica of the Thoreau cabin. My sister took a picture of me looking thoughtful at the desk like the one where the writer wrote. I also put a Macy’s cup in the hand of a statue of Henry to take a photo that was later Scotch taped to the cash register of my favorite coffeehouse.
Hardy gals that we are, we decided to walk all the way around Walden Pond. The trail follows the shoreline within spitting distance of the water, but the vegetation is too thick to access the edge most of the way. Finally on the far side we spotted a clear place to peer through binoculars at birds. Loons maybe? We tried to see the opening in the woods where we’d been at the cabin site.
And then my sister took a second look and realized there seemed to be stones set for stepping down. And in the time it takes to say, “I had three chairs in my house; one for company, two for friendship, three for society,” my sister shed her rain jacket, shirt and pants and jumped right into Walden Pond to gasp and laugh and paddle around.
Remembering her splashing is exactly the vision I want to hold through my winter sorting of next and next and next. Her frolic in a National Historical Landmark might be just the right antidote when I fret instead of following the philosopher’s advice: “Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.”
Henry might have savored Walden Pond as company for finding truth, but is also just a pond. And it’s not that cold. And there is my sister’s clothing on the bushes and she is splashing and we are laughing. If Henry was a time traveler, I think as I watch her, then maybe 1846 is blending into this day and maybe there he is peering toward us right now. I bet he marvels at so much life interrupting his philosophical thoughts: my sister backstroking and smiling and then flipping to plunge into the deep. My laughing meets the ripples and the sun sparkling and again I agree with the man who wrote, “Surely joy is the condition of life.”
