The birth of shadow

June 2.

I look now from the yard to the waving and slightly glaucous-tinged June meadows, edged by the cool shade of shrubs and trees, — a waving shore of shady bays and promontories, — yet different from the August shades. The air has now begun to be filled with a bluish haze. These virgin shades of the year, when everything is tender, fresh and green, — how full of promise!  I would fain be present at the birth of shadow. It takes place with the first expansion of the leaves.

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?

When we returned to our boat at 7 p. m., I noticed first, to my surprise, that the river was all alive with leaping fish, their heads seen continually darted above water, and they were large fish, too. Looking up I found that the whole atmosphere over the river was full of shad-flies. 

It was a great flight of ephemera. 

It was not so when I landed an hour and a half before. They extended as high as I could see. It was like a dense snow-storm, and all (with very few exceptions) flying as with one consent up the stream. Many coupled in the air, and many more with the bodies curved. They reached a mile or more from the stone-heaps to the mouth of the Assabet, but were densest where there were woods on both sides, whether they came out of them, or they made the air more still for them. Those I examined had three very long streamers behind, the two outside about an inch and a quarter. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 2, 1854

I would fain be present at the birth of shadow. See  May 17, 1852 ("The birch leaves are so small that you see the landscape through the tree, and they are like silvery and green spangles in the sun, fluttering about the tree.”); May 21, 1860 ("Noticed the shadows of apple trees yesterday”); May 24, 1860 (“I notice the first shadows of hickories, - not dense and dark shade, but open-latticed, a network of sun and shadow on the north sides of the trees.”); June 4, 1860 (" . . . a grateful but thin shade, like a coarse sieve, so open that we see the fluttering of each leaf in its shadow.”); June 11, 1856 (“I observe and appreciate the shade, as it were the shadow of each particular leaf on the ground..”).


When we returned to our boat at 7 p. m . . .It was a great flight of ephemera. See June 8, 1856 (“my boat being by chance at the same place where it was in ’54, I noticed a great flight of ephemera”); June 9, 1854 ("7 p. m. — Up Assabet. . . .[T]here is an incessant sound made by the fishes leaping for their evening meal, dimpling the river like large drops as far as I can see . ..”); June 9, 1856 ("Again, about seven, the ephemera came out, in numbers as many as last night, ...; and the fishes leap as before. . . . “); June 15,1850(“I observe to-night, June 15th, the air over the river by the Leaning Hemlocks filled with myriads of newly fledged insects drifting and falling as it were like snow-flakes from the maples, only not so white. Now they drift up the stream, now down, while the river below is dimpled with the fishes rising to swallow the innumerable insects which have fallen [into] it and are struggling with it.”)

June 2. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 2

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 © 2009-2021