A load of hay in the winter revives the memory of past summers!

January 5. 

P. M. – I see one of those fuzzy winter caterpillars, black at the two ends and brown-red in middle, crawling on a rock by the Hunt's Bridge causeway. 

Mr. Hosmer is loading hay in his barn. It is meadow hay, and I am interested in it chiefly as a botanist. If meadow-hay is of less worth in the market, it is more interesting to the poet. In this there is a large proportion of Osmunda regalis. But I fear that in the long run it is not so interesting to the cattle to contemplate and chew this as English hay and clover. 

How completely a load of hay in the winter revives the memory of past summers! Summer in us is only a little dried like it. The rowen in Hosmer's barn has a finer and greener look than the first crop. 

And so the ferns in coal remind us of summer still longer past.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 5, 1858


I see one of those fuzzy winter caterpillars, black at the two ends and brown-red in middle, crawling on a rock by the Hunt's Bridge causeway. See  March 5, 1854 ("See a small blackish caterpillar on the snow. Where do they come from? "); March 8, 1855 ("I see of late more than before of the fuzzy caterpillars, both black and reddish-brown.”); January 8, 1857 ("I picked up on the bare ice of the river, opposite the oak in Shattuck's land, on a small space blown bare of snow, a fuzzy caterpillar, black at the two ends and red-brown in the middle, rolled into a ball . . .”);  November 29, 1857 ("One of those fuzzy caterpillars, black at each end and rust-colored in middle, curled up in a ring, — the same kind that I find on the ice and snow, frozen, in winter.") 

And so the ferns in coal remind us of summer still longer past. See June 5, 1857 (" . . . those strange fossil plants whose impressions I see on my coal."); July 23, 1856 ("That fern leaf on my coal ")