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| the nostrils of the earth, white with the frozen earth’s breath. |
Colder than yesterday morning; perhaps the coldest of the winter.
P. M. — To Ledum Pond.
Those small holes in the ground, – musquash, mice, etc., – thickly beset with crystals of frost, remind me of the invisible vapor issuing thence which may be called Earth’s breath, though you might think it were the breath of a mouse.
In cold weather you see not only men's beards and the hair about the muzzles of oxen whitened with their frozen breath, but countless holes in the banks, which are the nostrils of the earth, white with the frozen earth’s breath.
About the ledum pond-hole there is an abundance of that abnormal growth of the spruce. Instead of a regular, free, and open growth, you have a multitude of slender branches crowded together, putting out from the summit or side of the stem and shooting up nearly perpendicularly, with dense, fine, wiry branchlets and fine needles, which have an impoverished look, altogether forming a broom-like mass, very much like a heath.
There is, apparently, more of the Andromeda Polifolia in that swamp than anywhere else in Concord.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 12, 1858
About the ledum pond-hole there is an abundance of that abnormal growth of the spruce. See February 4, 1858 ("There are many small spruce thereabouts, with small twigs and leaves, an abnormal growth, reminding one of strange species of evergreen from California, China, etc. ")
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 12
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
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