The warm brown-red glow of the Andromeda calyculata toward the sun.

January 3.

Sunday. 

I see a flock of F. hyemalis this afternoon, the weather is hitherto so warm. 

About, in his lively “Greece and the Greeks,” says, “These are the most exquisite delights to be found in Greece, next to, or perhaps before, the pleasure of admiring the masterpieces of art, — a little cool water under a genial sun.” I have no doubt that this is true. Why, then, travel so far when the same pleasures may be found near home?

The slosh on Walden had so much water in it that it has now frozen perfectly smooth and looks like a semitransparent marble. Being, however, opaque, it reminds one the more of some vast hall or corridor's floor, yet probably not a human foot has trodden it yet. Only the track-repairers and stokers have cast stones and billets of wood on to it to prove it. 

Going to the Andromeda Ponds, I was greeted by the warm brown-red glow of the Andromeda calyculata toward the sun. I see where I have been through, the more reddish under sides apparently being turned up. It is long since a human friend has met me with such a glow.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 3, 1858

I see a flock of F. hyemalis this afternoon, the weather is hitherto so warm. See December 28, 1856 ("Am surprised to see the F. hyemalis here."); December 29, 1856 ("Do not the F. hyemalis, lingering
yet, and the numerous tree sparrows foretell an open winter?"); January 18, 1858 ("The F. hyemalis about."):  January 23, 1858 ("The wonderfully mild and pleasant weather_continues. The ground has been bare since the 11th. . . .  There has been but little use for gloves this winter, though I have been surveying a great deal for three months. The sun, and cockcrowing, bare ground, etc., etc., remind me of March.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Dark-eyed Junco (Fringilla hyemalis)

It is long since a human friend has met me with such a glow. See November 24, 1857 ("Looking toward the sun, the andromeda in front of me is a very warm red brown and on either side of me, a pale silvery brown; looking from the sun, a uniform pale brown. . . .These andromeda swamps charmed me more than twenty years sgo, — I knew not why —"); January 24, 1855 ("Those Andromeda Ponds are very attractive spots to me. They are filled with a dense bed of the small andromeda, a dull red mass as commonly seen, brighter or translucent red looking toward the sun, grayish looking from it...); January 10,1855("As I go toward the sun now at 4 P. M., the translucent leaves are lit up by it and appear of a soft red, more or less brown, like cathedral windows, but when I look back from the sun, the whole bed appears merely gray and brown or less reddish.”); April 19 1852 ("That phenomenon of the andromeda seen against the sun cheers me exceedingly. . . .")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 3

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