As I sit comfortably in 2011, I’ve noticed that nature affects my nineteenth-century characters’ lives much more than it affects mine. After all, I can brew coffee with the push of a button, and I routinely check the temperature on my Mac’s dashboard rather taking two steps across the room and sticking my head out the window. My characters in The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, as well as the historical novel I’m working on now, on the other hand, aren’t nearly so insulated. If you are living in northern Michigan in 1835 and you want a cup of coffee, you or someone who works for you will soon be outside chopping wood. Probably in the rain.

While Henry David Thoreau famously embraced nature as they key to understanding our existence, his Concord neighbor Louisa May Alcott was a little more ambivalent. Louisa was a city girl. She loved the theater and the conversations that took place in parlors after the show was over. She loved the bustle of Boston, which provided her the opportunity to live independently from her overbearing family and gave her the privacy a writer so desperately needs to do her work. But the noise and grit also wore on her, as did the guilt of being away from her parents. Concord offered quiet and company, long walks through the woods and to Walden Pond, wildflowers, birds, honey bees.

Like many pale, bookish, allergic people, most of what I know of nature comes from books. I have never seen the Redwoods in person, but, because of John Muir’s writing, I feel like I have. I’ve walked through Willa Cather’s windswept Nebraska prairies, hiked Barbara Kingsolver’s Appalachian forest, her coyotes darting among the trees. I’ve been lost on Bronte’s Moors and felt afraid of Tom Franklin’s secret-filled Mississippi swamps.

I am fond of that Logan Pearsall Smith quote, “Some people say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” It may be true, but it’s pretty pathetic. I think about nature through my characters’ eyes, but I seldom remember to see it though my own. Last summer we moved very close to Lake Michigan on Chicago’s far north side and I find myself paying closer attention to the birds, to the wind off the lake, to the frozen waves. Perhaps this bookworm is finally inching toward the out-of-doors!