A January Thaw.

December 28

All day a drizzling rain, ever and anon holding up with driving mists. A January thaw. 

December 28, 2023

The snow rapidly dissolving; in all hollows a pond forming; unfathomable water beneath the snow. 

Went into Tommy Wheeler's house, where still stands the spinning-wheel, and even the loom, home-made. Great pitch pine timbers overhead, fifteen or sixteen inches in diameter, telling of the primitive forest here. 

The white pines look greener than usual in this gentle rain, and every needle has a drop at the end of it. There is a mist in the air which partially conceals them, and they seem of a piece with it. 

Some one has cut a hole in the ice at Jenny's Brook, and set a steel trap under water, and suspended a large piece of meat over it, for a bait for a mink, apparently.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 28, 1851

Tommy Wheeler house. See February 22, 1857 ("The Tommy Wheeler house, like the Hunt house, has the sills projecting inside.")

The white pines look greener than usual in this gentle rain, and every needle has a drop at the end of it. There is a mist in the air which partially conceals them. See November 29, 1850 ("The pines standing in the ocean of mist, seen from the Cliffs, are trees in every stage of transition from the actual to the imaginary. As you advance, the trees gradually come out of the mist and take form before your eyes. "); December 15, 1855 ("The low grass and weeds, bent down with a myriad little crystalline drops, ready to be frozen perhaps, are very interesting, but wet my feet through very soon. A steady but gentle, warm rain."); See also December 31, 1851 ("The round greenish-yellow lichens on the white pines loom through the mist . . . They eclipse the trees they cover.");  May 13, 1852 ("A May storm, yesterday and to-day;. . . The fields are green now, and all the expanding leaves and flower-buds are much more beautiful in the rain, - covered with clear drops.") And A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The White Pines

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