The boys have been skating for a week, but I have had no time to skate for surveying. I have hardly realized that there was ice, though I have walked over it about this business.
As for the weather, all seasons are pretty much alike to one who is actively at work in the woods. I should say that there were two or three remarkably warm days and as many cold ones in the course of a year, but the rest are all alike in respect to temperature. This is my answer to my acquaintances who ask me if I have not found it very cold being out all day.
McKean tells me of hardy horses left to multiply on the Isle of Sable. His father had one (for the shipwrecked to eat). Can they be descendants of those beasts Champlain or Lescarbot refers to?
I hear the small woodpecker whistle as he flies toward the leafless wood on Fair Haven, doomed to be cut this winter.
The chickadees remind me of Hudson's Bay for some reason. I look on them as natives of a more northern latitude.
The now dry and empty but clean-washed cups of the blue-curls spot the half snow-covered grain-fields. Where lately was a delicate blue flower, now all the winter are held up these dry chalices. What mementos to stand above the snow!
The fresh young spruces in the swamp are free from moss, but it adheres especially to the bare and dead masts of spruce trees oftentimes half destitute of bark. They look like slanting may-poles with drooping or withered garlands and festoons hanging to them. For an emblem of stillness, a spruce swamp with hanging moss now or at any season.
I notice that hornets' nests are hardly deserted by the insects than they look as if a truant boy had fired a charge of shot through them, -- all ragged and full of holes. It is the work either of the insects themselves or else of other insects or birds.
It is the andromeda (panicled?)
that has the fine barked stem and the green wood, in the swamps.
Why not live out more yet, and
have my friends and relations altogether in nature, only my acquaintances among
the villagers? That way diverges from this I follow, not at a sharp but a very
wide angle.
Ah, nature is serene and immortal! Am I not one of the Zincali?
There is a beautifully pure greenish-blue sky
under the clouds now in the southwest just before sunset.
I hear the ice along the edge of the river cracking as the water settles. It has settled about two feet, leaving ice for the most part without water on the meadows, all uneven and cracked over the hummocks, so that you cannot run straight for sliding.
The ice takes the least hint of a core to eke out a perfect plant; the wrecks of bulrushes and meadow grass are expanded into palm leaves and other luxuriant foliage. I see delicate-looking green pads frozen into the ice, and, here and there, where some tender and still green weeds from the warm bottom of the river have lately been cast up on to the ice.
There are certain places where the river will always be open, where perchance warmer springs come in. There are such places in every character, genial and open in the coldest seasons.
I come from contact with certain acquaintances, whom even I am disposed to look toward as possible friends. It oftenest happens that I come from them wounded. Only they can wound me seriously, and that perhaps without their knowing it.
There is a beautifully pure greenish-blue sky under the clouds now in the southwest just before sunset. See December 25, 1851 (“I go forth to see the sun set. Who knows how it will set, even half an hour beforehand ?”); January 11, 1852 ("The glory of these afternoons, . . . is in the ineffably clear blue, or else pale greenish-yellow, patches of sky in the west just before sunset."); December 11, 1854 ("It is but mid-afternoon when I see the sun setting far through the woods, and there is that peculiar clear vitreous greenish sky in the west, as it were a molten gem.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Western Sky
The now dry and empty but clean-washed cups of the blue-curls spot the half snow-covered grain-fields. See November 30, 1856 (“Now see the empty chalices of the blue-curls and the rich brown-fruited pinweed above the crust.”); December 1, 1856 (“The blue-curls' chalices stand empty, and waiting evidently to be filled with ice.”); December 4, 1856 ("How many thousand acres are there now of pitchered blue-curls and ragged wormwood rising above the shallow snow?")Deserted hornets' nests. See October 15, 1855 ("The hornets’ nests are exposed, the maples being bare, but the hornets are gone”); October 25, 1854 ("The maples being bare, the great hornet nests are exposed.”); December 29, 1856 (“I see a hornets' nest about seven inches in diameter on a thorn bush, only eighteen inches from the ground.”); December 29, 1858 ("A large hornets’ nest thirty feet high on a maple over the river.”) ; December 31, 1857 ("Under and attached to one of the lowermost branches of a white pine sapling in my old potato-field, I see a large hornet's nest, close to the ground.")
It is the andromeda (panicled?) that has the fine barked stem and the green wood, in the swamps. See note to 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 ago, — I knew not why") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The andromeda phenomenon
There are certain places where the river will always be open, where perchance warmer springs come in. See December 30, 1855 ("The places which are slowest to freeze in our river are, first, on account of warmth as well as motion, where a brook comes in, and also probably where are springs in banks and under bridges.")
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