Like the fruits, when cooler weather and frosts arrive, we too are braced and ripened..

September 14. 

High, gusty winds, with dust and a little rain (more or less for two or three days). These powerful gusts fill all the air with dust, concealing the earth and sky. 

P. M. — To Cliffs via Hubbard's Bath. 

The Spiranthes cernua has a sweet scent like the clethra's. 

The mountain sumach appears to bear quite sparingly. Its berries are a hoary crimson and not bright like those of the smooth. Also they are in looser masses. They are, perhaps, a little later, but I think ripe now. 

I see in the swamp under the Cliffs the dark, decaying leaves of the skunk-cabbage, four or five spreading every way and so flat and decayed as to look like a fungus or mildew, making it doubtful at first what plant it is; but there is the sharp green bud already revealed in the centre between the leaf-stalks, ready to expand in the spring. 

This wind has strewn the Fair Haven Hill-side with apples. I think that fully three quarters of all are on the ground. Many trees are almost entirely stripped, the whole crop lying in a circular form beneath, yet hard and green. Others on the hillside have rolled far down. The farmers will be busy for some time gathering these windfalls. 

The winds have come to shake the apple trees prematurely, making fruit (for pies) cheap, I trust, against Thanksgiving or Cattle-Show. Not only apples and other fruit, but a great many green as well as withered leaves, strew the ground under almost all kinds of trees. 

I notice of late the green or ripe pods of the Orchidaceoe, — some for a long time, — including gymnodenia, lady's-slipper, etc.; pods full of a fine, dust-like seed. The dusty-seeded Orchidaceoe. 

The yellow lily (Nuphar advena) fruit, now green and purplish, is ripening under water, full of yellow seeds 

The white lily, when stripped of the blackened and decaying petals, etc., is of this form:  

Even the tough-twigged mocker-nut, yet green, is blown off in some places. I bring home a twig with three of its great nuts together, as big as small apples, and children follow and eye them, not knowing what kind of fruit it is. 

Like the fruits, when cooler weather and frosts arrive, we too are braced and ripened. When we shift from the shady to the sunny side of the house, and sit there in an extra coat for warmth, our green and leafy and pulpy thoughts acquire color and flavor, and perchance a sweet nuttiness at last, worth your cracking. 

Now all things suggest fruit and the harvest, and flowers look late, and for some time the sound of the flail has been heard in the barns. 

They are catching pigeons nowadays. Coombs has a stand west of Nut Meadow, and he says that he has    just shot fourteen hawks there, which were after the pigeons. 

I have one which he has shot within a day or two and calls a pigeon hawk.

Audubon's "Pigeon Hawk" [Merlin]
"Adult male with the cere greenish-yellow, the feet pale orange, the upper parts light bluish-grey, each feather with a black central line; lower parts reddish or yellowish-white, the breast and sides with large oblong brown spots; tibial feathers light red, streaked with blackish-brown. Female with the cere and legs greenish-yellow, the upper parts dark greyish-brown, the lower pale red, spotted as in the male."

•  It is about twenty inches in alar extent. 
• Above dark-slate or brownish with the edges, i. e. tips, of the feathers (especially of wing-coverts) rufous. 
• The primaries and secondaries dark or blackish brown, barred with black, and only  some white concealed on the inner vanes near the base. 
• Wings beneath white or whitish, thickly barred with dark. 
• Scapulars with white spots. 
• Head much mutilated, but no "black spots" visible, but apparently the dark brown mixed or edged with rufous. 
• Cere, etc., said to have been green.
•  Beneath brownish-white, centred with brown, with a darker line through that. 
• Femorals still more rustyish brown, with central dashes. 
• Legs yellowish. 
• Tail slate, with four black bars half an inch or more wide; the edge slate, with a very narrow edging of white; beneath the slate is almost white. 

What kind of hawk is this? 

I can learn nothing from Wilson and Nuttall. The latter thinks that neither the pigeon nor sparrow hawk is found here !! 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 14, 1859


The mountain sumach appears to bear quite sparingly. Its berries are a hoary crimson. See August 28, 1853 ("The berries of the dwarf sumach are not a brilliant crimson, but as yet, at least, a dull sort of dusty or mealy crimson"); October 2, 1856 ("The mountain sumach now a dark scarlet quite generally.")

Spiranthes  cernus
[nodding ladies' tressses orchid]

The Spiranthes cernua has a sweet scent like the clethra's. See September 2, 1856 ("Spiranthes cernua, apparently some days at least, though not yet generally; a cool, late flower, growing with fringed gentian"); September 15, 1856 ("Spiranthes cernua in prime.")

The farmers will be busy for some time gathering these windfalls. See September 3, 1859 ("A strong wind, which blows down much fruit."); September 13, 1852 ("Yesterday, it rained all day, with considerable wind, which has strewn the ground with apples and peaches, and, all the country over, people are busy picking up the windfalls"); September 17, 1858 ("The orchards are strewn with windfalls, mostly quite green.")

Like the fruits, when cooler weather and frosts arrive, we too are braced and ripened. . . . our green and leafy and pulpy thoughts acquire color and flavor, and perchance a sweet nuttiness at last.

The ripening year,

all my thoughts break out spotted

yellow, green and brown.

September 8, 1854 

See August 17, 1851 (" For a day or two it has been quite cool, a coolness that was felt even when sitting by an open window in a thin coat on the west side of the house in the morning, and you naturally sought the sun at that hour. The coolness concentrated your thought. . . I feel as if this coolness would do me good. If it only makes my life more pensive! . . . My life flows with a deeper current.");; August 7, 1854 ("Do you not feel the fruit of your spring and summer beginning to ripen, to harden its seed within you? Do not your thoughts begin to acquire consistency as well as flavor and ripeness? . . .Already some of my small thoughts — fruit of my spring life — are ripe, like the berries which feed the first broods of birds."); January 30, 1854 ("It is for man the seasons and all their fruits exist. The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of his brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. Then is the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought.");  June 6, 1857 (“A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind. ”) Compare July 30 1852 ("After midsummer we have a belated feeling . . ., just as in middle age man anticipates the end of life"); August 18, 1853 (“What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now? — now is the season of fruits; but where is our fruit?)

Now all things suggest fruit and the harvest, and flowers look late, and for some time the sound of the flail has been heard in the barns. See  September 13,1858 ("From many a barn these days I hear the sound of the flail.") See also July 31, 1856 ("I hear the distant sound of a flail, and thoughts of autumn occupy my mind, and the memory of past years."); August 18, 1856 ("It reminds me of past autumns and the lapse of time, suggests a pleasing, thoughtful melancholy, like the sound of the flail");   October 31, 1860 ("I hear the sound of the flailing . . . and gradually draw near to it from the woods, thinking many things.");