The saunterer's apple.

 

October 31.  

October 31, 2016

The wild apples are now getting palatable. I find a few left on distant trees, which the farmer thinks it not worth his while to gather. He thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken, unless he has a walker's appetite and imagination, neither of which can he have. These apples cannot be too knurly and rusty and crabbed  . . . The saunterer's apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house. The noblest of fruits is the apple. Let the most beautiful or swiftest have it.

The robins now fly in flocks.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 31, 1851

Wild apples. See September 21, 1852 ("It is an agreeable surprise to find in the midst of a swamp so large and edible a fruit as an apple."); October 27, 1855 (“I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house."); October 27, 1855 (“To appreciate their wild and sharp flavors, it seems necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. They must be eaten in the fields. . . Some of those apples might be labelled, “To be eaten in the wind.” “); November 4, 1855 ("It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild apple.“); November 7, 1858 ("My apple harvest! It is to glean after the husbandman and the cows, or to gather the crop of those wild trees far away on the edges of swamps which have escaped their notice. . . . I fill my pockets on each side, and as I retrace my steps, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, in order to preserve my balance."); November 11, 1850 ("Now is the time for wild apples. . . Food for walkers."); December 18, 1859 ("Apples are thawed now and are very good. Their juice is the best kind of bottled cider that I know. They are all good in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press.") See also December 11, 1855 ("Standing there, though in this bare November landscape, I am reminded of the incredible phenomenon of small birds in winter. ... The age of miracles is each moment thus returned. Now it is wild apples, now river reflections, now a flock of lesser redpolls.").

Frozen wild apples

soon thaw in my chamber and

yield a sweet cider.

December 19, 1850

Robins flocking. See October 31, 1853 ("On the hill, I see flocks of robins, flitting from tree to tree and peeping.") See also October 20, 1857 ("The barberry bushes are now alive with, I should say, thousands of robins feeding on them."); November 3, 1857 (" I see on many rocks, etc., the seeds of the barberry, which have been voided by birds, – robins, no doubt, chiefly. How many they must thus scatter over the fields, spreading the barberry far and wide! That has been their business for a month.")