In the early 1990s we visited our good friend MaryBeth in Massachusetts. MaryBeth had become like one of the family during the year we taught together and lived together on the same compound on the Hopi First Nation in Arizona.
The year after our teaching stint was over MaryBeth invited us to visit her home in Natick Massachusetts. She did a grand job of showing us the Boston area where she lives.
One of the places she took us was Walden Pond, where the famous author Henry David Thoreau had his home.
The place didn’t look that auspicious. There was a simple sign to mark the spot where Thoreau’s cabin once stood and a pile of rocks which I learned later had been started after Thoreau died by his good friends the Alcotts. One of the Alcott’s daughters Louisa May would become the famous author of Little Women.
Thoreau had impacted the Alcott family greatly so they built a small cairn of stones by his cabin to memorialize him after he died.
Apparently since Thoreau’s death people from around the world have come to Walden Pond bringing stones with them to add to the pile.
On the day we visited we noticed that many of the stones had writing on them. Our friend MaryBeth told us that if we wrote a wish on one of the stones, the rain would eventually wash our wish into Walden Pond and it would come true. She had brought along a felt marker so we could write our wishes on the Walden Pond rocks.
That day at Walden Pond I wrote a wish that someday I would have a book published. I never told anyone about that wish until my first novel Lost on the Prairie came out in 2021.
In the afterward of the book I wrote………..
In 1991 our family visited Walden Pond. We were invited to write a wish on one of the rocks in a pile near the spot where writer Henry David Thoreau’s cabin had once stood. Our guide said rain would wash our wish into the pond and eventually it would come true. Now, thirty years later, mine has.
Thanks MaryBeth for taking us to Walden Pond. I might not have published a book without you.
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