*I wrote this in May. I promise I will get it together and post in chronological order on a timely schedule in the future (I’ll write this 50 times on the chalkboard in my office).
I told my friend Iris that, at 40, I can no longer hold my sunshine. I spend all winter longing for it and, when it finally shines, I go off.
On the first late spring day of the pandemic, the first really warm, stay-outside-all-day day, we set up a water table for the boys and my husband did yard work. The car wash across the street had a customer who parked in the lot and turned their stereo up very loud. Usually this annoys me. The bass rattles our windows. But that day, the sun went to my head and I couldn’t stop dancing, eyes closed, face held up to the light and the warmth. I was so giddy to be outside, not stuck in the house listening to my family chew. I danced a long time. When I opened my eyes, the kids had wandered back inside and my husband was cleaning up the yard tools.
I don’t know what I looked like when I flailed around the yard in my dirty gardening shorts and shredded Detroit Pistons t-shirt to the sweary hip-hop booming across the street. Only my neighbors can attest to that. In my memory, it’s become the scene from the movie Housesitter where Goldie Hawn goes to dance class (here’s a very blurry clip, but it’s a great spring movie and I recommend you watch the whole film).
I do know that after this experience getting black-out Vitamin D’d, I can no longer control how I will react to that sun. I spend my spring days asking my family and friends and co-workers if they can believe how beautiful it is outside. Can you believe it? I think it’s perfect! “It’s actually perfect outside, right now,” is a text I will send to my girlfriend text thread and then, if I don’t get a quick enough response, my husband, and then my mom, then each of my siblings. “Does anyone want to go for a walk? Should we eat outside tonight? Shall we admire the tulips? Want to smell this lilac bush? Do you think we should quit our jobs and pull the kids out of school and just sit beside riverbeds braiding each other’s hair and reading out loud and making daisy chains and fucking basking in this glorious sun for the rest of our lives???”
The Transcendentalists are not quelling my mania. In April, I began Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. It details the group’s years in Concord and beyond and it was like reading a Cottagecore gossip column.
The group spent their years in Concord taking long walks and sitting in the woods or on Walden Pond discussing transcendentalism and abolition and flirting with each other. Each of them carried a secret torch for another: Thoreau loved Emerson's wife and children, Alcott loved Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville loved each other for a time. Everyone else was in love with Margaret Fuller. The connections made a beautiful constellation of all these like-minded people admiring each other.
It wasn't all confessions on the riverbed and apple picking though. In fact, Hawthorne had to move at one point after getting in a fight over whether or not he could pick his landlord's apples. Most of these unique minds lived in poverty, occasionally hitting up Emerson for money or housing, and died before their work and ideas became well recognized. Cheever's research balances the romance and the tragedy evenly. And the rabbit hole this book will send you down! As I was reading it, I had a running list of other works I needed to read and re-read, because I want to experience Little Women again knowing that Laurie's character is thought to be based on Thoreau; or read The Scarlet Letter with Hawthorne and Fuller in mind as Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne. I picked up one of Louisa May Alcott's diaries and basked in passages like this:
1845
Concord, Thursday. — I had an early run in the woods before the dew was off the grass. The moss was like velvet, and as I ran under the arches of yellow and red leaves I sang for joy, my heart was so bright and the world so beautiful. I stopped at the end of the walk and saw the sunshine out over the wide “Virginia meadows.”
It seemed like going through a dark life or grave into heaven beyond. A very strange and solemn feeling came over me as I stood there, with no sound but the rustle of the pines, no one near me, and the sun so glorious, as for me alone. It seemed as if I felt God as I never did before, and I prayed in my heart that I might keep that happy sense of nearness in my life.
This did not cure me of wanting to run away over a field with my arms spread out wide. Did you know that for many years I have had a picture in my head of myself as an old lady in a straw hat, painting at some seniors outdoor artist colony? And did you know that I assumed it may have been fate or some wisdom deep inside of me that created this image, but instead when I really thought about it, I realized that the image was not, in fact, a divine message, but from the final scene in the movie Twins where Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger find their long lost mom? My family recorded Twins off of an HBO free weekend and I watched it so many times that the final scene got locked away in my head as a fucking vision quest. So think about that the next time you think hearing the same Shins song twice in one week means you should call an ex.
These were the books and short works Bloomsbury inspired me to read:
The Dial: Transcendentalist journal, edited by Fuller
Moods, Alcott's first novel. Moods is such a great name for a novel, bitchy and seductive.
“Life Without Principle” by Thoreau, written after Margaret Fuller, along with her husband and young son drowned in a shipwreck and Thoreau walked the shoreline, searching for any remnant of Fuller's that hadn't already been looted. DON’T READ THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH UNLESS YOU’RE OKAY WITH BEING A LITTLE BIT MORE DEPRESSED FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. The ship ran aground close enough to shore on Fire Island for all of their shit to wash up, but not close enough that people could save them on the stormy seas, so these poor passengers watched people sift through their belongings while sitting on a sinking ship. REALLY, STOP READING. Fuller placed her trust in one of the ship's crew to swim her baby to shore and saw them both drown before drowning herself shortly after. Anyway, Thoreau wrote the article about how materialistic people were, to their own detriment. The ship was carrying a fancy marble statue, which contributed to the sinking. I’M SORRY.
Summer on the Lakes by Fuller
Moby Dick, mostly because there was a picture of Melville and he looks like a sea-sprayed Chris Evans. But looks alone can't get me through 600+ pages, so I pivoted and read the new Wild and Distant Seas by Tara Karr Roberts, which sews the characters of Moby Dick into a story of four generations of women, beginning in Nantucket. It was great, visceral and propelling. It had a little bit of a Practical Magic vibe, but was historical in addition to being magical.
My family stopped in Concord on our way to Boston a few years ago, and I felt I could have stayed there forever. We saw the house where Alcott wrote Little Women and we walked the shoreline of Walden Pond, which still held a majestic feeling even though I read it's getting algae blooms from too many people peeing in it. It felt sacred to stand in places where great minds connected and great friendship furthered a community.
I imagine every town is actually special like this. It's just that in Concord, people wrote it down. It made me wish that we could see plaques outside homes and buildings of people who did not become posthumously famous. Or that there would be roadside signs like the “Boys 1999 State Basketball Champions” ones, except they would say stuff like:
"The same ten women cooked for 500 grieving families over 25 years in this church basement" or
“This is the house where all the wayward teenage kids felt safe and welcome and the mom here made them pizza rolls and told them being gay is okay” or
"This is the sharp curve by the lake where a stranger jumped in the water and pulled a man from his sinking car" or
“This is the school auditorium where a bunch of people who don’t normally agree on a ton got together and hollered until the school board stopped banning books”, and then you could hang little penants with all the years different generations had to come back and keep reminding others not to ban books. 1637-2024.
Wouldn’t you love to visit a town with signs like that? Wouldn’t it be a great tourist attraction? It's nice to think nice thoughts about people coming together to make something they couldn't do alone. I would like to sit on a rock by a roaming riverbed and dream about it awhile.