Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Yellow butterflies in the damp road.

September 3.

September 3, 2023

Fair weather and a clear atmosphere after two days of mizzling, cloudy, and rainy weather and some smart showers at daylight and in the night. The street is washed hard and white. 

P. M. —- With Minot Pratt into Carlisle.

Woodbine berries purple. 

Even at this season I see some fleets of yellow butterflies in the damp road after the rain, as earlier. 

Pratt showed me a tobacco flower, long and tubular, slightly like a datura. 

In the meadow southwest of Hubbard's Hill saw white Polygala sanguinea, not described.

Close to the left-hand side of bridle-road, about a hundred rods south of the oak, a bayberry bush without fruit, probably a male one. 

It made me realize that this was only a more distant and elevated sea-beach and that we were within reach of marine influences. My thoughts suffered a sea-turn.

North of the oak (four or five rods), on the left of the bridle-road in the pasture next to Mason’s, tried to find the white hardback still out, but it was too late. 

Found the mountain laurel out again, one flower, close sessile on end of this year’s shoot. There were numerous blossom-buds expanding, and they may possibly open this fall.

A white hardback out of bloom by a pile of stones (on which I put another) in Robbins’s field, and a little south of it a clump of red huckleberries.

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

Even at this season I see some fleets of yellow butterflies in the damp road after the rain, as earlier. See July 26, 1854 ("Today I see in various parts of the town the yellow butterflies in fleets in the road, on bare damp sand, twenty or more collected within a diameter of five or six inches in many places . . . I do not know what attracts them thus to sit near together , like a fleet in a haven; why they collect in groups.") See also July 14, 1852 ("See to-day for the first time this season fleets of yellow butterflies in compact assembly in the road”); July 16, 1851 ("I see the yellow butterflies now gathered in fleets in the road, and on the flowers of the milkweed"); July 19, 1856 ("Fleets of yellow butterflies on road.");  October 18, 1856 (“I still see a yellow butterfly occasionally zigzagging by the roadside”); October 20, 1858 ("I see yellow butterflies chasing one another, taking no thought for the morrow, but confiding in the sunny day as if it were to be perpetual.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Yellow Butterflies

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

Again see fleets of 
yellow butterflies in the 
damp road after rain.

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

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-540903

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