–Henry David Thoreau

In my youth, when I was more romantic, I was proud of loving weather — all weather. I had a Wuthering Heights sort of sensibility for dramatic climatic turbulence in picturesque landscapes. I loved to stand out by Quarton Lake in the pouring rain, thunder and lightning ripping the sky, rejoicing.

“All the world will know Thor’s wrath!” I would chortle to the swaying willow trees, repeating something I’d read in English class. Thor was the Norse god who threw thunderbolts around. Zeus was his Greek counterpart in the thunderbolt department. I was pretty selective about what I learned in school, but I knew my mythology.

No matter that Quarton Lake was a modest body of water, and a polluted one at that. It was fed by the River Rouge in Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Grandma Allen recalled when it was the old mill pond, the village swimming hole.

I’ve lived in the Adirondacks for more than 30 years and now it seems odd to look back and remember how once, to my mind, Quarton Lake, along with Grandma’s woods, was the very heart of wilderness. As Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

It’s a good idea to designate November as the time to count and list our blessings, because otherwise, as the darkness gathers and grows, as the wind picks up and the gray clouds loom, as the temperature drops and the rain turns to sleet, we might forget that we are grateful. It is easy enough to be thankful in June or October, but November could make ingrates of us all.

I am no Henry David Thoreau, not high-minded enough to entirely overcome my ingratitude. A certain crankiness may come with age, creeping up on a person as she stomps around the bedroom in the middle of the night trying to get rid of a leg cramp. This can happen even to a girl who once exulted in a thunderstorm on the banks of Quarton Lake.

Reading what Thoreau had to say can help to put things into perspective.

Thoreau loved to saunter, as he put it, for several hours every day through the woods and fields, coming home to record his observations of the natural world in his journal.

“An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day,” he wrote.

Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” published after his death in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1862, is available in paperback. Maybe I will give it to myself for Christmas. In this essay, Thoreau observed: “When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them — as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon — I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.”

Crankily, I sometimes think OK, Henry David, it was all right for you, randomly sauntering around and making comments about shopkeepers.

To be fair, he did odd jobs and he sometimes worked in his family’s pencil factory, although he took his laundry home for his mother to wash.

My sister tells me that white-tailed deer have now taken up residence in the woods along the Rouge, occasionally emerging to wreak havoc in her garden. This is a relatively recent development, and one that does not inspire her with gratitude. “Deer are a very successful species,” she allows.

I agree with my sister that deer are a successful species, despite the way so many of them perish while attempting to cross the highway. Why did the white-tail cross the street? Nobody knows. It is incomprehensible, beyond our ability to reason.

I watched a doe yesterday as she stood at the edge of State route 73 in Keene. The road was deserted; there had been no traffic for some time. Eventually an automobile appeared in the distance, heading north. As it approached, its engine grew louder and louder. Finally, at the very last moment, the doe charged out into the road, flinging herself into the path of the oncoming vehicle. Oh no!

Luckily, this time she made it unscathed to the other side of the road and disappeared into the underbrush.

Something to be thankful for. Have a good week.

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)