Monday, November 16, 2015

A Book of the Seasons: November 16 (blustery cold, silvery light, noticing buds, ferns and evergreen plants, Indian summer)



The year is but a succession of days,
and I see that I could assign some office to each day
which, summed up, would be the history of the year.
Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852


A truly good book
is wildly natural as
fungus or lichen.

The jay on alert
mimicking each woodland note –
What happened? Who's dead?

Pines look cold – 
now reflecting 
a silvery light. 

At Holden's spruce swamp 
the water is frozen in 
the pitcher-plant leaf.  

I now take notice
of the green polypody
and the other ferns.
November 16, 1853

November 16, 2015

November 16, 2017


A cold and blustering afternoon; sky for the most part overcast. November 16, 1858

A part of to-day and yesterday I have been making shelves for my Oriental books. November 16, 1855

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen. November 16, 1850

Muskrat-houses completed. Interesting objects looking down a river-reach at this season, and our river should not be represented without one or two of these cones. They are quite conspicuous half a mile distant, and are of too much importance to be omitted in the river landscape. November 16, 1852 

The pines on shore look very cold, reflecting a silvery light. November 16, 1852 

At Holden's Spruce Swamp. The water is frozen in the pitcher-plant leaf.   November 16, 1852 

I hear deep amid the birches some row among the birds or the squirrels, where evidently some mystery is being developed to them. The jay is on the alert, mimicking every woodland note. What has happened? Who 's dead? The twitter retreats before you, and you are never let into the secret.  November 16, 1850

I now take notice of the green polypody on the rock and various other ferns. November 16, 1853

Methinks the wintergreen, pipsissewa, is our handsomest evergreen, so liquid glossy green and dispersed almost all over the woods. The mountain laurel, the lycopodium dendroideum, complanatum, and lucidulum, and the terminal shield fern are also very interesting.  November 16, 1858

The partridge-berry leaves checker the ground on the side of moist hillsides in the woods. Are they not properly called checker-berries? November 16, 1850

The swamp-pink and blueberry buds attract. November 16, 1852 

At Lee's Cliff the Cerastium viscosum [common mouse-ear] November 16, 1852 

Rubus hispidus leaves last through the winter, turning reddish. November 16, 1858

I see many more nests in the alders now than I suspected in the summer. November 16, 1855

This and yesterday Indian-summer days. November 16, 1860

There seems to be in the fall a sort of attempt at a spring, a rejuvenescence, as if the winter were not expected by a part of nature. November 16, 1850

Violets, dandelions, and some other flowers blossom again, and mulleins and in numerable other plants begin again to spring and are only checked by the increasing cold. There is a slight uncertainty whether there will be any winter this year. November 16, 1850

The cold weather which began on the 12th, with the snow of the 13th and since, suddenly killed the few remaining living leaves, without any exceptions to speak of. November 16, 1858

In my two walks I saw only one squirrel and a chickadee. Not a hawk or a jay. November 16, 1860

November 16, 2021

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Blue Jay
A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The White Pines

November 16, 2018


November 2, 1857 (“My thoughts are with the polypody a long time after my body has passed. ”)
November 5, 1855 ("Swamp-pink buds now begin to show.”); November 6, 1853 (“The remarkable roundish, plump red buds of the high blueberry.”)
November 5, 1857 ("At this season polypody is in the air. ") 
November 11, 1851 (“There is a cold, silvery light on the white pines as I go through J.P. Brown's field near Jenny Dugan's. Every withered blade of grass and every dry weed, as well as pine-needle, reflects light”)
November 11, 1858 (“In the meadows the pitcher-plants are bright-red. ”) 
November 13, 1851 (“A cold and dark afternoon, the sun being behind clouds in the west. The landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety.”)
November 15, 1857 ("The water is frozen solid in the leaves of the pitcher plants")
November 15, 1858 ("I go to look for evergreen ferns before they are covered up. The end of last month and the first part of this is the time.")
November 15, 1859 ("I see several musquash-cabins off Hubbard Shore distinctly outlined as usual in the November light.")


November 17, 1858 ("The polypody on the rock is much shrivelled by the late cold")
November 17, 1858  ("We are interested at this season by the manifold ways in which the light is reflected to us.")
November 17, 1859 ("Another Indian-summer day, as fair as any we've had.")
November 19, 1850 ("Now that the grass is withered and the leaves are withered or fallen, it begins to appear what is evergreen the partridge-berry and checkerberry, and winter-green leaves even, are more conspicuous.”);
November 20, 1858 ("The Rubus hispidus leaves last all winter like an evergreen. ")
November 27, 1853 ("Checkerberries and partridge-berries are both numerous and obvious now")
December 1, 1852 (“At this season I observe the form of the buds which are prepared for spring,- the large bright yellowish and reddish buds of the swamp-pink, the already downy ones of the Populus tremuloides and the willows, the red ones of the blueberry”)
December 3, 1856 (“The silvery needles of the pine straining the light.")

November 16, 2018

If you make the least correct
observation of nature this year,
 you will have occasion to repeat it
 with illustrations the next, 
and the season and life itself is prolonged.

November 15  <<<<<<<<<  November 16.  >>>>>>>> November 17

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  November 16
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 © 2009-2023


tinyurl.com/HDT16NOV

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