A cold day. The snow that fell November 17th in the evening is still seen on the ground.
Again I hear that sharp, crackling, snapping sound and, hastening to the window, find that another of the pitch pine cones gathered November 7th, lying in the sun, or which the sun has reached, has separated its scales very slightly at the apex.
It is only discoverable on a close inspection, but while I look the whole cone opens its scales with a smart crackling and rocks and seems to bristle up, scattering the dry pitch on the surface.
They all thus fairly loosen and open, though they do not at once spread wide open.
It is almost like the disintegration of glass. As soon as the tension is relaxed in one part, it is relaxed in every part.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 20, 1855
Again I hear that sharp, crackling, snapping sound . . . See November 14, 1855 (“ . . . It is a general and sudden bursting or expanding of all the scales with a sharp crackling sound and motion of the whole cone, as by a force pent up within it. I suppose the strain only needed to be relieved in one point for the whole to go off. “); February 27, 1853 ("That hard closed cone, which defied all violent attempts to open it has thus yielded to the gentle persuasion of warmth and dryness. The expanding of the pine cones, that, too, is a season.”)
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November 20
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
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