“My house was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that lived there;and commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy” (Thoreau 275).

While this was not my favorite passage from this passage of Walden, I definitely felt a connection to it. This past weekend, both Saturday and Sunday nights have come with a freeze warning. Sunday was also the day that the heat in my house was finally turned on, so it was a huge difference between coming home Saturday to a cold house and Sunday to a warm house. That extra bit of warmth is very welcoming and homely.

“Herring and shad have returned to the Hudson, though they spent some generations adjusting to radioactivity trickling out of Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant…Missing, however, are nearly all fauna adapted to us. The seemingly invincible cockroach, a tropical import, long ago froze in unheated apartment buildings” (44).

I thought the author was being very presumptuous and contradictory here. He claims that some species could adapt to radioactivity but others could not adapt to climate change. He also contradicts himself as he says earlier in the chapter that global temperatures would have risen. Overall I enjoyed the piece although it was very dark, but this one point really stuck out to me.