The stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow.

November 18

About an inch of snow fell last night, but the ground was not at all frozen or prepared for it. A little greener grass and stubble here and there seems to burn its way through it this forenoon. 

As I sit in the house, I am struck with the brightness and heat of the sun reflected from this our first snow. There is an intenser light in the house, and I feel an uncommon heat from the sun’s rays on my back. 

It clears up at noon, and at 2 P. M. I go to Fair Haven Hill via Hubbard’s Grove. The air is very clear, and the sky heavenly, with a few floating downy clouds. 

I am prepared to hear sharp, screaming notes rending the air, from the winter birds. I do, in fact, hear many jays, and the tinkling, like rattling glass, from chickadees and tree sparrows. 

I do not detect any peculiar brightness whatever in the osiers on the Hubbard causeway; they are scarcely, if at all, brighter than the tops of the trees.

Now first mark the stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. They have suddenly acquired a new character. 

Yarrow

Tansy still shows its yellow disks, but yarrow is particularly fresh and perfect, cold and chaste, with its pretty little dry-looking rounded white petals and green leaves. Its very color gives it a right to bloom above the snow, —as level as a snow-crust on the top white ruff. 

The snow is the great track-revealer. I come across the tracks of persons who, at a different hour from myself, have crossed, and perhaps often cross, some remote field on their errands, when I had not suspected a predecessor; and the track of the dog or staff are seen too. The cattle have tracked their whole pasture over, as if there had been a thousand. I have this silent but unerring evidence of any who have crossed the fields since last night. It is pleasant to see tracks leading towards the woods, - to be reminded that any have engagements there. 

Yet for the most part the snow is quite untrodden. Most fields have no track of man in them. I only see where a squirrel has leaped from the wall. 

The perfectly leafless alder thickets are much darker than the maples, now that the ground is whitened. The pasture directly under my face is white, but, seen aslant a few rods off, mostly russet. 

I was so warmed in spirit in getting my wood that the heat it finally yielded when burnt was coldness in comparison. That first is a warmth which you cannot buy. 

Gather a bagful of fair apples on Fair Haven, showing their red cheeks above the snow. These apples which I get nowadays —russets and Baldwins — are the ripest of all, being acted on by the frost and partly left because they were slightly over ripe for keeping. I come home with a heavy bagful and rob no one. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 18, 1855

The snow is the great track-revealer. See December 4, 1856 ("How many thousand acres are there now of pitchered blue-curls and ragged wormwood rising above the shallow snow? . . .the first snow comes and reveals them.") December 8, 1855 ("Let a snow come and clothe the ground and trees, and I shall see the tracks of many inhabitants now unsuspected"); December 12, 1859 ("The snow having come, we see where is the path of the partridge, — his comings and goings from copse to copse, — and now first, as it were, we have the fox for our nightly neighbor, and countless tiny deer mice."); December 22, 1852 ("The squirrel, rabbit, fox tracks, etc., attract the attention in the new-fallen snow . . . You cannot go out so early but you will find the track of some wild creature."): December 31, 1853 ("This animal probably I should never see the least trace of, were it not for the snow, the great revealer."); January 4, 1860 ("Again see what the snow reveals . . . that the woods are nightly thronged with little creatures which most have never seen"); January 5, 1860 ("How much the snow reveals!"); February 16, 1854 ("Snow is a great revealer not only of tracks made in itself, but even in the earth before it fell.")

I do not detect any peculiar brightness whatever in the osiers. See November 18, 1858 ("Notice the short bright-yellow willow twigs on Hubbard’s Causeway.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  the Osier in Winter and early Spring

Now first mark the stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. See December 26,1853 ("All weeds, with their seeds, rising dark above the snow, are now remarkably conspicuous, which before were not observed against the dark earth.”) See note to November 29, 1856 ("Begins to snow this morning and snows slowly and interruptedly with a little fine hail all day till it is several inches deep. This the first snow I have seen.")

Tansy still shows its yellow disks, but yarrow is particularly fresh and perfect, cold and chaste. See November 18, 1852 ("Yarrow and tansy still. These are cold, gray days.”); See also  November 3, 1853 ("To-day I see yarrow, very bright"); ; November 22, 1853 ("Yarrow is particularly fresh and innocent") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Yarrow and Tansy in Autumn

November 18. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November 18

Rounded white petals 

of yarrow above the snow –

perfect, cold and chaste.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, 

The stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. 

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 ©  2009-2025

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