Another round red sun of dry and dusty weather.

June 18.

The Rosa lucida is pale and low on dry sunny banks like that by Hosmer's pines. There are many strawberries this season, in meadows now, just fairly begun there. The meadows, like this Nut Meadow, are now full of the taller grasses, just beginning to flower.

Ovenbird

Observe in two places golden-crowned thrushes, near whose nests I must have been, hopping on the lower branches and in the underwood, — a somewhat sparrow-like bird, with its golden-brown crest and white circle about eye, carrying the tail somewhat like a wren, and inclined to run along the branches. Each had a worm in its bill, no doubt intended for its young. That is the chief employment of the birds now, gathering food for their young. I think I heard the anxious peep of a robin whose young have just left the nest.

Small grasshoppers very abundant in some dry grass. Another round red sun of dry and dusty weather to-night, — a red or red-purple helianthus. Every year men talk about the dry weather which has now begun as if it were something new and not to be expected.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 18, 1854

And more today on slavery:

My advice to the State is simply this: to dissolve her union with the slaveholder instantly. ... And to each inhabitant of Massachusetts, to dissolve his union with the State, as long as she hesitates to do her duty.

See May 29, 1854 , June 9, 1854, June 16, 1854, June 17, 1854 and ""Slavery in Massachusetts.

Observe in two places golden-crowned thrushes, near whose nests I must have been . . . See June 10, 1855 ("Oven-bird’s nest with four eggs two thirds hatched, under dry leaves, composed of pine-needles and dry leaves and a hair or two for lining,”)

I think I heard the anxious peep of a robin whose young have just left the nest. See June 10, 1853 ("We  hear the cool peep of the robin calling to its young, now learning to fly.")  See also  May 13, 1853 ("A robin's nest, with young, on the causeway."): May 24, 1855 ("Young robins some time hatched");June 9, 1856 ("A young robin abroad. "); June 15, 1855 ("Robin’s nest in apple tree, twelve feet high — young nearly grown."): June 15, 1852 ("Young robins,speck dark-led,"); June 20, 1855 (" A robin’s nest with young, which was lately, in the great wind, blown down and somehow lodged on the lower part of an evergreen by arbor,—without spilling the young!")

Every year men talk about the dry weather which has now begun as if it were something new and not to be expected. See July 7, 1853 ("Now is that annual drought which is always spoken of as something unprecedented and out of the common course.")

June18. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, June 18

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 © 2009-2020