“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it has to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
I’m watching the Ken Burns PBS series about Thoreau. He has always been a hero of mine. 39 years ago I gave Rickie his book on Walden. If anyone could have lived happily like Thoreau, Rickie could have. And did in the time he got to spend at the ranch. Which was limited because he still had to work in the big city.
I was fortunate to spend 6 years living by myself in a little 464 sq ft cedar cabin on 54 acres. Three a half years when Rickie spent 2 full days and 4 half days there a month. On the weekends he drove out from Houston. Then I spent two and a half years alone after he died.
I was a half mile from the nearest neighbor. I wasn’t a sociable person, still aren’t, so almost all of my days were spent with only the company of the longhorns Woodrow and Gus. And the wild turkeys, deer, foxes, jackrabbits and birds. I spent most of the days outside. Taking walks around our place, taking photos, writing sometimes in my blog about my life there.
Like Thoreau, after Rickie died, I too wanted to see if I could live there by myself, remote from everything in a county made up of big ranches and small acreages like ours and a few tiny and tinier towns. It wasn’t a tourist county or town, not like Wimberly or Fredericksburg or Marble Falls. The visitors were mostly hunters. And most of them on deer leases at the big ranches.
I wasn’t a country girl. I had lived in Houston close to 50 years and always lived in towns. Rickie was a country boy and I had learned enough from him to feel like I could stay there. And I just wasn’t prepared to walk away from that life at that time.
Later when I added on a bedroom and did so much of the work myself, I was also testing myself. To see what I could do on my own. My years at the ranch were spent on that. On hauling feed and hay for the longhorns and wildlife. Tending our garden. Planting flowers. Making repairs. Watching sunsets and the rare rainstorm. Studying the wildlife and how they lived.
It was a simple life lived in the simplest way. Simple suppers of kale and cornbread or a pot of chili. A cold beer on the porch after a day of work. Talking with the longhorns, wondering what they thought about things. The work was hard and pushed me to my limits, and sometimes over them. But the first time I kicked a 1000 pound bale of hay out of the back of the truck, I let out a yell! And when I nailed the last ceiling board at the peak of the 12’ addition ceiling, I was the proudest of anything I’ve ever done, before or since.
Like Thoreau, I eventually left. The sadness of Rickie not being there overtook me. And like Thoreau said “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”
