Pink azalea in garden.
Mountain-ash a day; also horse-chestnut the same. Beach plum well out, several days at least.
Wood pewee, and Minott heard a loon go laughing over this morning.
The vireo days have fairly begun. They are now heard amid the elm-tops.
Thin coats and straw hats are worn. I have noticed that notional nervous invalids, who report to the community the exact condition of their heads and stomachs every morning, as if they alone were blessed or cursed with these parts; who are old betties and quiddles, if men; who can't eat their break fasts when they are ready, but play with their spoons, and hanker after an ice-cream at irregular hours; who go more than half-way to meet any invalidity, and go to bed to be sick on the slightest occasion, in the middle of the brightest forenoon, — improve the least opportunity to be sick ; — I observe that such are self-indulgent persons, without any regular and absorbing employment. They are nice, discriminating, experienced in all that relates to bodily sensations. They come to you stroking their wens, manipulating their ulcers, and expect you to do the same for them. Their religion and humanity stick. They spend the day manipulating their bodies and doing no work; can never get their nails clean.
Some of the earliest willows about warm edges of woods are gone to seed and downy.
P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook.
It is very hazy after a sultry morning, but the wind is getting east and cool.
The oaks are in the gray, or a little more, and the silvery leafets of the deciduous trees invest the woods like a permanent mist. At the same season with this haze of buds comes also the kindred haziness of the air.
I see the common small reddish butterflies.
Very interesting now are the red tents of expanding- oak leaves, as you go through sprout-lands, — the crimson velvet of the black oak and the more pinkish white oak. The salmon and pinkish-red canopies or umbrellas of the white oak are particularly interesting.
The very sudden expansion of the great hickory buds, umbrella-wise.
Now, at last, all leaves dare unfold, and twigs begin to shoot.
As I am going down the footpath from Britton's camp to the spring, I start a pair of nighthawks (they had the white on the wing) from amid the dry leaves at the base of a bush, a bunch of sprouts, and away they flitted in zigzag noiseless flight a few rods through the sprout-land, dexterously avoiding the twigs, uttering a faint hollow what, as if made by merely closing the bill, and one alighted flat on a stump.
On those carpinus trees which have fertile flowers, the sterile are effete and drop off.
The red choke-berry not in bloom, while the black is, for a day or more at least.
Roadside near Britton's camp, see a grosbeak, apparently female of the rose-breasted, quite tame, as usual, brown above, with black head and a white streak over the eye, a less distinct one beneath it, two faint bars on wings, dirty-white bill, white breast, dark spotted or streaked, and from time [to time] utters a very sharp chirp of alarm or interrogation as it peers through the twigs at me.
 |
| May 26, 2018 |
At Abel Brooks's (or Black Snake, or Red Cherry, or Rye) Hollow, hear the wood thrush.
In Thrush Alley, see one of those large ant-hills, recently begun, the grass and moss partly covered with sand over a circle two feet in diameter, with holes two to five inches apart, and the dry sand is dark-spotted with the fresh damp sand about each hole.
My mother was telling to-night of the sounds which she used to hear summer nights when she was young and lived on the Virginia Road, — the lowing of cows, or cackling of geese, or the beating of a drum as far off as Hildreth's, but above all Joe Merriam whistling to his team, for he was an admirable whistler.
Says she used to get up at midnight and go and sit on the door-step when all in the house were asleep, and she could hear nothing in the world but the ticking of the clock in the house behind her.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 26, 1857
Pink azalea in garden. See May 26, 1860 ("Our pink azalea”); May 25, 1856 ("Azalea nudiflora in garden."); May 29, 1855("Azalea nudiflora in garden”); May 17, 1854 ("Azalea nudiflora in woods begins to leaf now.");May 31, 1853 ("I am going in search of the Azalea nudiflora.”) [Rhododendron periclymenoides , pinxterbloom azalea]
Wood pewee. See note to May 26, 1852 ("I hear the pea-wai, the tender note.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Eastern Wood-Pewee
It is very hazy after a sultry morning, but the wind is getting east and cool. See May 26, 1855 (“Again a strong cold wind from the north by west, turning up the new and tender pads”); May 26, 1860 (“Overcast, rain-threatening; wind northeast and cool”)
At the same season with this haze of buds comes also the kindred haziness of the air. See May 15, 1860 ("At this season there is thus a mist in the air and a mist on the earth.") May 15, 1854 ("The aspect of oak and other woods at a distance is somewhat like that of a very thick and reddish or yellowish mist about the evergreens."); May 27, 1855 ("How important the dark evergreens now seen through the haze in the distance and contrasting with the gauze-like, as yet thin-clad deciduous trees").
A lady's-slipper. At Cliffs, no doubt, before. See May 27, 1852 ("Ladies'-slippers out. They perfume the air.”); May 30, 1856 (“The lady’s-slipper in pitch pine wood-side near J. Hosmer’s Desert, probably about the 27th”).
No comments:
Post a Comment