Shadows of bright clouds sweep over the meadow-grass waving in the wind.

May 19

This has been the longest drought that I remember.  The last rain was April 16th.

A gentle intermittent warm rain at last begins, but to our disappointment it clears up at noon, and very little rain has fallen.

There is a stong southwest wind after the rain, rather novel and agreeable, blowing off some apple blossoms.

May 19, 2014

The grass, especially the meadow-grasses, are seen to wave distinctly, and the shadows of the bright fair-weather cumuli are sweeping over them like the shades of a watered or changeable stuff — June like.

The grass and the tender leaves, refreshed and expanded by the rain, are peculiarly bright and yellowish-green when seen in a favorable light. 

This occurrence of pretty strong southwest winds near the end of May, three weeks after the colder and stronger winds of March and April have died away, after the first heats and perhaps warm rain, when the apple trees and upland buttercups are in bloom, is an annual phenomenon. 

Not being too cold, they are an agreeable novelty and excitement now, and give life to the landscape.

Sorrel just begins to redden some fields. 

I have seen for a week a smaller and redder butterfly than the early red or reddish one. Its hind wings are chiefly dark or blackish. It is quite small. The forward wings, a pretty bright scarlet red with black spots.

See a green snake, a very vivid yellow green, of the same color with the tender foliage at present, and as if his colors had been heightened by the rain. 

This is the season when the meadow-grass is seen waving in the wind at the same time that the shadows of clouds are passing over it. 

At the Ministerial Swamp I see a white lady's-slipper almost out, fully grown, with red ones. 

By the path-side near there, what I should call a veery's nest with four light-blue eggs, but I have not heard the veery note this year, only the yorrick. It is under the projecting edge or bank of the path, — a large mass of fine grass-stubble, pine-needles, etc., but not leaves, and lined with pine-needles.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, May 19, 1860

There is a stong southwest wind after the rain, rather novel and agreeable, blowing off some apple blossoms. See May 20, 1854 ("Methinks we always have at this time those washing winds as now, when the choke-berry is in bloom, — bright and breezy days blowing off some apple blossoms.”); May 27 1852 ("The road is white with the apple blossoms fallen off, as with snowflakes.”); June 1, 1855 ("A very windy day,  . . . scattering the remaining apple blossoms.”)

Shadows of the bright fair-weather cumuli.  See May 30, 1852 (“A breezy, washing day. A day for shadows, even of moving clouds, over fields in which the grass is beginning to wave.”)

May 19. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, May 19

Shadows of  bright clouds 

sweep over the meadow-grass

waving in the wind.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024