The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows.

October 13

October 13, 2015

The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows. The bass is bare. A thick carpet of white pine needles lies now lightly, half an inch or more in thickness, above the dark-reddish ones of last year.

Larks in flocks in the meadows, showing the white in their tails as they fly, sing sweetly as in spring.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 13, 1855

The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows. See October 13, 1852 ("Many maples have lost all their leaves and are shrunk all at once to handsome clean gray wisps on the edge of the meadows. Crowded together at a distance they look like smoke.”); October 13, 1857 (“Maple fires are burnt out generally, and they have fairly begun to fall and look smoky in the swamps.”); See also  October 10, 1851 ("Some maples which a week ago were a mass of yellow foliage are now a fine gray smoke, as it were, and their leaves cover the ground.");  October 18, 1855 ("The maple swamps, bare of leaves, here and there about the meadow, look like smoke blown along the edge of the woods.")

A thick carpet of white pine needles.  See October 13, 1857 ("The pitch and white pines on the north of Sleepy Hollow,. . . are at the height of their change, generally, though many needles fallen, carpeting the ground.") See also  October 12, 1852 ("A new carpet of pine leaves is forming in the woods. The forest is laying down her carpet for the winter.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The October Pine Fall

Larks in flocks in the meadows, showing the white in their tails as they fly, sing sweetly as in spring. See October 6, 1851 ("Both larks and blackbirds are heard again now occasionally, seemingly after a short absence, as if come to bid farewell.") October 18, 1858 ("See larks, with their white tail-feathers, fluttering low over the meadows these days"); November 1, 1853 ("I see and hear a flock of larks in Wheeler's meadow on left of the Corner road, singing exactly as in spring and twittering also, but rather faintly or suppressedly."); See also June 30, 1851 ("The lark sings a note which belongs to a New England summer evening."); August 4, 1852 ("I must make a list of those birds which, like the lark and the robin, if they do not stay all the year, are heard to sing longest of those that migrate.")

October 13. See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, October 13

The basswood is bare.

The maples now stand like smoke 

along the meadows.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The maples now stand like smoke along the meadows.

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