All is moist and dissolving.

January 13.

Still warm and thawing, springlike; no freezing in the night, though high winds.  The landscape is now patches of bare ground and snow; much running water with the sun reflected from it. Lately all was clean, dry, and tight. Now, though clear and bright, all is moist and dissolving. Walden is covered with puddles, in which you see a dim reflection of the trees and hills on the grayish or light-colored snow-ice.

In the deep hollow this side of Britton's Camp, I hear a singular buzzing sound from the ground, exactly like that of a large fly or bee in a spider's web. I kneel down, and with pains trace it to a small bare spot as big as my hand, amid the snow, and searched there amid the grass stubble for several minutes, putting the grass aside with my fingers, till, when nearest to the spot, not knowing but I might be stung, I use a stick. The sound is incessant, like that of a large fly in agony, but I find neither prey nor oppressor. 

At length I change the tone with my stick, and so trace it to a few spires of dead grass standing in the melted snow water. It is a sound issuing from the earth. 

There is no bubble in the water. Perhaps it is air confined under the frozen ground, now expanded by the thaw, and escaping upward through the water by a hollow grass stem.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 13, 1854

Walden is covered with puddles, in which you see a dim reflection of the trees and hills on the grayish or light-colored snow-ice. See  January 8, 1860 ("The sloshy edges of the puddles are the frames of so many wave-shaped mirrors in which the leather-colored oak leaves, and the dark-green pines and their stems, on the hillside, are reflected. "); February 7, 1857 (“The water on the ice is for the most part several inches deep, and trees reflected in it appear as when seen through a mist or smoke, apparently owing to the color of the ice.”); February 15, 1859 ("We walk through almost invisible puddles on the river and meadows, in which we see the trees, etc., reflected. ")

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, I love you like I love the sky

January 13.  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 13

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 © 2009-2022