A little while ago I needed a good kid’s book for a read aloud. In the interest of time, I simply went to the bookshelves in my home where I keep the books my kids have outgrown but are too well loved to pass on or let go. My hand fell immediately on a favorite, “Henry Builds a Cabin” by D.B. Johnson.

Brunswick resident Heather D. Martin wants to know what’s on your mind; email her at heather@heatherdmartin.com.

Big mistake.

The book itself is wonderful. The Henry books are simplified retellings of the life and works of Henry David Thoreau. This book in particular is about his creation of the cabin in the woods along Walden Pond.

Johnson manages to cover a lot of ground with few words and his illustrations are full-on charming with hidden “clues” throughout each picture. The book is a gem.

So why a “mistake”? It wasn’t the book that was the problem, it was the reader.

The issue, you see, is: that used to be my life. And I loved it. I never really meant to leave it. I lived, for over 20 years, in a very small cabin at the end of a long dirt road in some very thick woods. No other houses could be seen from mine.

I’d bought the cabin as a shell and most of the interior I’d build myself with help from friends. The first eight years there was no electricity and for most of the first year there was no well either, so I hauled water in buckets up from the stream or melted snow on the woodstove, the only source of heat.

The windows were all single pane and during the winter there was often a substantial layer of ice on the inside. Some nights we had “indoor camping” and snuggled in sleeping bags around the woodstove because bedrooms were too cold. Also, I freely admit the black flies were astounding. But. The night skies there were breathtaking, every summer we woke to the calls of the loons and on snow days we’d make s’mores at the woodstove. That house was a place where you could literally hear the snowfall and with the skis by the front door, fresh snow simply meant an adventure in the morning.

I left that home for all the reasons people usually leave magical places: work, education, new horizons. I don’t regret leaving. It was time and I really love my new life here in Southern Maine. The kids are branching out, it’s possible to sit outdoors without being carried away by bugs and I adore my work. So there is no regret. But there has been a strange longing. Oddly, a solution to this longing has also been one massive gift from lockdown.

During this time of enforced solitude, I have found again some quiet, some “still.” More importantly, in my attempt to create meaningful “at-home” lessons for my students I have been outdoors, hiking the trails alone, paying attention to what trees and plants I find, mapping details, charting paths. I have become aware that the magic and the mystery I was missing … is here. Just as with the book, the problem was with the reader.

And so, with thanks to Henry David, I hereby recommit to paying more attention every day, to continue to “live deliberately,” even in the sometimes uncomfortable comforts of my new town life, and to continue to “learn what (life has) to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”