A book which should be a memorial of October.

November 22.

Geese went over yesterday, and to-day also.

The drizzling rain of yesterday has not checked the fall of the river. It was raised by the rain of Sunday, the 13th, and began to fall the 20th.

P. M. — Up river by boat.

I think it must be the white lily root I find gnawed by the rats, though the leaves are pellucid. It has large roots with eyes and many smaller rootlets attached, white tinged with a bluish slate-color. The radical leaves appear to have started again.

Turnip freshly in bloom in cultivated fields; knawel still; yarrow is particularly fresh and innocent; but I find no blossom on the Arenaria serpyllifolia.

If there is any one with whom we have a quarrel, it is most likely that that one makes some just demand on us which we disappoint.

I see still, here and there, a few deep-sunk yellow and decayed pads, the bleared, dulled, drowned eyes of summer.

I was just thinking it would be fine to get a specimen leaf from each changing tree and shrub and plant in autumn, in September and October, when it had got its brightest characteristic color, the intermediate ripeness in its transition from the green to the russet or brown state, outline and copy its color exactly with paint in a book, a book which should be a memorial of October, be entitled October Hues or Autunnal Tints.

I remember especially the beautiful yellow of the Populus grandidentata and the tint of the scarlet maple.

What a memento such a book would be, beginning with the earliest reddening of the leaves, woodbine and ivy, etc., etc., and the lake of radical leaves, down to the latest oaks! I might get the impression of their veins and outlines in the summer with lampblack, and after color them.

As I was returning down the river toward night, I mistook the creaking of a plow-wheel for a flock of blackbirds passing overhead, but it is too late for them.

The farmers plow considerably this month. No doubt it destroys many grubs in the earth.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 22, 1853

Geese went over yesterday, and to-day. See November 20, 1853 ("Methinks the geese are wont to go south just before a storm, and, in the spring, to go north just after one, say at the end of a long April storm.”) See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Geese in Autumn

Yarrow is particularly fresh and innocent. See November 18, 1855 ("Tansy still shows its yellow disks, but yarrow is particularly fresh and perfect, cold and chaste, with its pretty little dry-looking rounded white petals and green leaves.")

I remember especially the beautiful yellow of the Populus grandidentata. See October 25, 1858 ("The leaves of the Populus grandidentata, though half fallen and turned a pure and handsome yellow, are still wagging as fast as ever. These do not lose their color and wither on the tree . . .but they are fresh and unwilted, full of sap and fair as ever when they are first strewn on the ground. I do not think of any tree whose leaves are so fresh and fair when they fall.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Big-toothed Aspen (Populus grandidentata)