An open Winter

March 1.

March 1, 2014

The divergent open capsules (?) of the rhodora, yellowish-brown, are quite interesting when the sun falls on them.

We have just had a winter with absolutely no sleighing, which I do not find that any one distinctly remembers the like of. It may have been as warm before, but with more snow. 

It was wonderfully warm and pleasant up to the 10th of February, and since then the greatest degree of cold I have heard of was —4°. 

The ground has been partially covered or whitened only since the 20th. It has been an excellent winter for walking in the swamps, or walking anywhere, and for lumbering operations in Maine, there being not too much snow, and yet the swamps, etc., frozen there.

H. D.Thoreau, Journal, March 1, 1858

We have just had a winter with absolutely no sleighing. See January 23, 1858 ("The wonderfully mild and pleasant weather continues. The ground has been bare since the 11th. . . .I have not been able to walk up the North Branch this winter, nor along the channel of the South Branch at any time") See also  note to January 23, 1857 ("I may safely say that -5° has been the highest temperature to-day by our thermometer."); and compare March 9, 1856 ("sixteen inches of snow on a level in open fields, hard and dry, ice in Flint’s Pond two feet thick, and the aspect of the earth is that of the middle of January in a severe winter."); February 24, 1856 (" there was as much snow as this in ’35, when [Dr. Jarvis] . . . drove in his sleigh from November 23d to March 30th excepting one day.”) See also February 11, 1852 (“Perhaps the best evidence of an amelioration of the climate - at least that the snows are less deep than formerly - is the snow-shoes which still lie about in so many garrets, now useless. No man ever uses them now, yet the old men used them in their youth.”)

It has been an excellent winter for walking in the swamps. See January 29, 1858 ("I go through the northerly part of Beck Stow's."); January 30, 1858 ("To Gowing's Swamp. I thought it would be a good time to rake in the mud of that central pool, and see what animal or vegetable life might be there, now that it is frozen."); February 4, 1858 ("To C. Miles Swamp. Discover the Ledum latifolium, quite abundant over a space about six rods in diameter just east of the small pond-hole"); February 19, 1854 ("I incline to walk now in swamps and on the river and ponds, where I cannot walk in summer.")