The woods first official opening. Holton Open Gardens. I stayed there, slept there, and rested there all weekend. (Good to be without internet and mobile phone ran out of charge – but went to sleep to radio 4, so a bit like Thoreau on Walden Pond, away but not too far away from civilisation.
Yes, Thoreau – time to revisit Walden Pond and his writings again:
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. (Walden, 3)
His famous lines, read with Bryan, all those years ago are:
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 had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. (Walden, 90)
I was mad to think of doing East Lodge as well, so last minute cancelled that. VIrginia’s yellow flags out road side. Spent a week getting the ideas implemented. 10 white posts guided people around the wood, starting with hard standing, down the hazel grove, out to the ponds and the view of the cabin, via the stumpery, back along the track.
Pauline the first to arrive, reminding me it was her walking group that were the first to come into the woodland 3 years ago now.
Drinking Ricard, smoking one of long gone Imo’s menthol cigarettes I found clearing up. John Moss comes to mind. He’d have liked Imo.
People start coming on Sunday, Holton and Halesworth people. ‘Owl wood’ someone told me they used to call this wood. Graham came and found some rare flower.
The wood van looks like this:
Kaliwood 