Unwieldy property

Was Henry David Thoreau a housesitter?

I swam in Walden Pond this week, and it felt like a baptism. Then afterwards, I couldn’t keep a phone signal long enough to get an Uber. I’d walked to the pond from my new sit location in Lincoln, which I’m sharing with two dogs, and hadn’t dressed appropriately for the woods trails. Whatever, I made the walk home tick-free and with sandals still intact. Like Thoreau himself, I “learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes a-foot.”

“…villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with!--to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug!”—H.D. Thoreau, Walden

I’m having a PJ day today, first day in weeks without work or people. It’s a little damp outside, and all three of us started the day too early because I needed to pee at 4 a.m. (“I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.”) Now we’re all three in power-saving mode, me and the two dogs each in a corner. They’re napping while I rummage about the internet for essays about Walden and accounts of Henry David Thoreau’s life, dragging citations way out of context to serve my own selfish ends.