Reflections in a bubble.

June 3, 2016
(avesong)

June 3.

To Fair Haven with Blake and Brown. 

A very warm day, without a breeze. 



A kingbird's nest in a fork of a black willow. 

Going up Fair Haven Hill, the blossoms of the huckleberries and blueberries impart a sweet scent to the whole hillside.

On the pond we make bubbles with our paddles on the smooth surface, in which little hemispherical cases we see ourselves and boat, small, black and distinct, with a fainter reflection on the opposite side of the bubble (head to head). These last sometimes a minute before they burst.  

Cross to Baker Farm and Mt. Misery. To-day, having to seek a shady and the most airy place, at length we are glad when the east wind rises, ruffles the water and cools the air, and wafts us homeward. 

How many times have  other similar bubbles, now burst, reflected here the Indian, his canoe and paddle with the same faithfulness that they now image me and my boat.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 3, 1854

A kingbird's nest in a fork of a black willow. June 2, 1854 ("Are these not kingbird days, when, in clearer first June days full of light, this aerial, twittering bird flutters from willow to willow and swings on the twigs, showing his white-edged tail?"); June 6, 1857 (" A kingbird's nest, with two of its large handsome eggs, very loosely set over the fork of a horizontal willow by river, with dried everlasting of last year, as usual, just below Garfield's boat. Another in black willow south of long cove (east side, north of Hubbard's Grove) and another north of said cove. "); June 8, 1858 (" A kingbird's nest with three eggs, lined with some hair, in a fork — or against upright part — of a willow, just above near stone bridge") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Eastern Kingbird

The blossoms of the huckleberries and blueberries impart a sweet scent to the whole hillside. See "The Whortleberry Family," December 30, 1860 ("The flowers have an agreeable sweet and berry-promising fragrance . . . In May and June all our hills and fields are adorned with a profusion of the pretty little more or less bell-shaped flowers of this family, commonly turned toward the earth and more or less tinged with red or pink and resounding with the hum of insects, each one the fore runner of a berry the most natural, wholesome, palatable that the soil can produce.")

Image in bubbles. See March 19, 1852 ("Standing with Channing on the brink of the rill . . .I observe our images three quarters of an inch long and black as imps appearing to lean toward each other on account of the convexity of the bubbles."); January 6, 1853 ("When I lie down on it [the ice] and examine it closely, I find that the greater part of the bubbles which I had thought were within its own substance are against its under surface . . .— perfect spheres, apparently, and very beautiful and clear, in which I see my face through this thin ice.") See aslo September 14, 1854("Now our oars leave a broad wake of large bubbles, which are slow to burst.”); June 7, 1857 (“Now I notice many bubbles left on the water in my wake, as if it were more sluggish or had more viscidity than earlier. Far behind me they rest without bursting.”)

How can that depth be 

fathomed where a man may see 

himself reflected?

August 17, 1851 

June 3. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 3

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Reflections in a Bubble

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

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