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
July 11, 2016
A cloud stretches overhead
lighting up the landscape with
soft fawn-colored light.
Seen as on the sea
shadows of clouds on the broad
and level meadow
Haying now begins
and the lark must look out for
the mowing-machine.
Blueberries' dark blue
with a bloom is a color
that surprises me.
Waving in the wind
this grass gives a purple sheen
over the meadow.
July 11, 2014
The sun is setting. The meadow-sweet has bloomed. These dry hills and pastures are the places to walk by moonlight. The moon is silvery still, not yet inaugurated. The tree-tops are seen against the amber west . . . I pluck the blossom of the milkweed in the twilight and find how sweet it smells. July 11, 1851
So we went through the aspens at the base of the Cliffs, their round leaves reflecting the lingering twilight on the one side, the waxing moonlight on the other. Always the path was unexpectedly open. July 11, 1851
On Bear Garden Hill . . . the moon shines over the pitch pines, which send long shadows down the hill. July 11, 1851
The bass on Conantum is now well in blossom . . . Its flowers are conspicuous for a tree, and a rather agreeable odor fills the air. The tree resounds with the hum of bees on the flowers. On the whole it is a rich sight. July 11, 1852
What is called genius is the abundance of life or health, so that whatever addresses the senses, as the flavor of these berries. . . — each sight and sound and scent and flavor, — intoxicates with a healthy intoxication . . . there is, then, a circulation of vitality beyond our bodies. The cow is nothing. Heaven is not there, but in the condition of the hearer . . . I have been inspired through the palate, that these berries have fed my brain . . . my senses whetted, I was young again, and whether I stood or sat I was not the same creature. July 11, 1852
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| Trichostema dichotomum (blue-curl) |
The aromatic trichostema now springing up. July 11, 1853
I hear Conant's cradle cronching the rye behind the fringe of bushes in the Indian field. Reaping begun. July 11, 1854
A straight edge of massy cloud advances from the south-southeast and now stretches overhead from west-southwest to east-northeast, and after sunset reflects a soft light on the landscape, lighting up with harmonious light the dry parched and shorn hillsides, the soft, mellow, fawn-colored light seeming to come from the earth itself. July 11, 1854
See young piping plover running in a troop on the beach like peetweets . . . The upland plover hovers almost stationary in the air with a quivering note of alarm. July 11, 1855 [Cape Cod]
The meadow is so broad and level that you see shadows of clouds on it as on the sea. July 11, 1856
Hear now the link of bobolinks, and see quite a flock of red-wing blackbirds and young. July 11, 1856
Looking off into the vales from Fair Haven Hill . . . a thin blue haze now rests almost universally . . . Thermometer at 93°+ this afternoon. July 11, 1857
I see more berries than usual of the Rubus triflorus in the open meadow near the southeast corner of the Hubbard meadow blueberry swamp . . . They are dark shining red and, when ripe, of a very agreeable flavor and somewhat of the raspberry's spirit. July 11, 1857
Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum ripe. Their dark blue with a bloom is a color that surprises me. July 11, 1857
Haying is fairly begun, and for some days I have heard the sound of the mowing-machine, and now the lark must look out for the mowers. July 11, 1857
He knew a dead log on the fire to be spruce, and not fir, because the stubs of the lower part slanted downward . . . After some observation I concluded that it was true that the base of the lower limbs of the spruce slanted downward more generally than those of the fir. July 11, 1858 [Mt. Washington]
Another hot day with blue haze, and the sun sets red, threatening still hotter weather, and the very moon looks through a somewhat reddish air at first. July 11, 1859
I am interested now by patches of Agrostis scabra. Drooping and waving in the wind a rod or two over amid the red-top and herd's-grass of A.Wheeler's meadow, this grass gives a pale purple sheen to those parts, the most purple impression of any grass. July 11, 1860
It is an exceedingly fine slender-branched grass, less noticeable close at hand than in a favorable light at a distance. You will see, thus, scattered over a meadow, little flecks and patches of it, almost like a flat purplish cobweb of the morning. July 11, 1860.
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| July 11, 2014 |
*****
See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau:
*****
The aromatic trichostema[blue-curls]now springing up.
See July 31, 1856 ("Trichostema has now for some time been springing up in the fields, giving out its aromatic scent when bruised, and I see one ready to open.")
And now the lark must look out for the mowers.
See June 30,1851 ("The lark sings a note which belongs to a New England summer evening."); July 16, 1851 ("The lark sings in the meadow; the very essence of the afternoon is in his strain. This is a New England sound")
The bass on Conantum is now well in blossom.
See July 16, 1852 ("The bass on Conantum is a very rich sight now, . . . The tree resounds with the hum of bees, — bumblebees and honey-bees ; rose-bugs and butterflies, also, are here, — a perfect susurrus, a sound, as C. says, unlike any other in nature, — not like the wind, as that is like the sea. . . . The air is full of sweetness. The tree is full of poetry.");. July 17, 1854 ("I was surprised by the loud humming of bees, etc., etc., in the bass tree; thought it was a wind rising at first. Methinks none of our trees attract so many"); . July 17, 1856 ("Hear at distance the hum of bees from the bass with its drooping flowers at the Island, a few minutes only before sunset. It sounds like the rumbling of a distant train of cars"); July 18, 1854 (" We have very few bass trees in Concord, but walk near them at this season and they will be betrayed, though several rods off, by the wonderful susurrus of the bees, etc., which their flowers attract. It is worth going a long way to hear. ")
Hear now the link of bobolinks, and see quite a flock of red-wing blackbirds and young
See.July 13, 1856 (“See quite a large flock of chattering red-wings, the flight of first broods.”); July 15, 1854 ("We seem to be passing, or to have passed, a dividing line between spring and autumn, and begin to descend the long slope toward winter. . . . Many birds begin to fly in small flocks like grown-up broods"); July 19, 1855 ("Young bobolinks; one of the first autumnalish notes."); July 22, 1855 ("See small flocks of red-wings, young and old, now, over the willows.")
Whatever addresses the senses . . . each sight and sound and scent and flavor, — intoxicates with a healthy intoxication.
See July 16, 1851 ("To have such sweet impressions made on us,. . . This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself."); August 3, 1852 ("By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody."); December 11, 1855 ("My body is all sentient. As I go here or there, I am tickled by this or that I come in contact with, as if I touched the wires of a battery.")
July 11, 2015
If you make the least correctobservation of nature this year,you will have occasion to repeat itwith illustrations the next,and the season and life itself is prolonged.
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
https://tinyurl.com/HDT11JULY
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