January 5.
To-day the trees are white with snow - I mean their stems and branches - and have the true wintry look, on the storm side. Not till this has the winter come to the forest. They look like the small frostwork in the path and on the windows now, especially the oak woods at a distance, and you see better the form which their branches take.
That is a picture of winter, and now you may put a cottage under them and roof it with snow-drifts, and let the smoke curl up amid the boughs in the morning.
To-day the trees are white with snow - I mean their stems and branches - and have the true wintry look, on the storm side. Not till this has the winter come to the forest. They look like the small frostwork in the path and on the windows now, especially the oak woods at a distance, and you see better the form which their branches take.
That is a picture of winter, and now you may put a cottage under them and roof it with snow-drifts, and let the smoke curl up amid the boughs in the morning.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 5, 1852
Trees . . .have the true wintry look, on the storm side. See December 23, 1851 (“There is a narrow ridge of snow, a white line, on the storm side of the stem of every exposed tree.”); December 26, 1855 (“The ice is chiefly on the upper and on the storm side of twigs”); January 14, 1856 ("You can best tell from what side the storm came by observing on which side of the trees the snow is plastered.")
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