Little mounds or tufts of yellowish or golden moss in the young woods look like sunlight on the ground.

February 7

Aunt Louisa has talked with Mrs. Monroe, and I can correct or add to my account of January 23d. She says that she was only three or four years old, and that she went to school, with Aunt Elizabeth and one other child, to a woman named Turner, somewhere in Boston, who kept a spinning-wheel a-going while she taught these three little children.

She remembers that one sat on a lignum-vitae mortar turned bottom up, another on a box, and the third on a stool; and then repeated the account of Jennie Burns bringing her little daughter to the school, as before.

I observed yesterday in that oak stump on the ditch bank by Trillium Wood (which I counted the rings of once) that between the twentieth and twenty-seventh ' rings there was only about three sevenths of an inch, though before and after this it grew very fast and seven spaces would make nearly two inches. The tree was growing lustily till twenty years old, and then for seven years it grew only one fourth or one fifth part as fast as before and after. I am curious to know what happened to it.

P. M. —To Cliffs through Wheeler’s pasture on the hill.

This new pasture, with gray stumps standing thickly in the now sere sward, reminds me of a graveyard. And on these monuments you can read each tree’s name, when it was born (if you know when it died), how it throve, and how long it lived, whether it was cut down in full vigor or after the infirrnities of age had attacked it.

I am surprised to find the epigaea on this hill, at the northwest corner of C. Hubbard’s (?) lot, i. e. the large wood. It extends a rod or so and is probably earlier there than where I have found it before. Some of the buds show a very little color. The leaves have lately been much eaten, I suspect by partridges.

Little mounds or tufts of yellowish or golden moss in the young woods look like sunlight on the ground.

If possible, come upon the top of a hill unexpectedly, perhaps through woods, and then see off from it to the distant earth which lies behind a bluer veil, before you can see directly down it, i. e. bringing its own near top against the distant landscape.

In the Fair Haven orchard I see the small botrychium still fresh, but quite dark reddish. 

The bark of the Populus grandidentata there is a green clay-color.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 7, 1858

Aunt Louisa has talked with Mrs. Monroe.  See January 23, 1858 ("Mrs. William Monroe told Sophia last evening that she remembered her (Sophia’s) grandfather very well,")

Epigaea repens: trailing arbutus. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Epigaea

Populus grandidentata: big-tooth aspen. A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,the Big-toothed Aspen (Populus grandidentata)

In the Fair Haven orchard I see the small botrychium still fresh, but quite dark reddish. See April 2, 1859 ("I see the small botrychium still quite fresh in the open pasture, only a reddish or leathery brown, — some, too, yellow. It is therefore quite evergreen and more than the spleenworts.")

Yellowish or golden moss in the young woods look like sunlight on the ground. Compare October 25, 1853 ("The ground is strewn with pine-needles as sunlight.")

Little mounds of truth,

yellowish or golden moss:

sunlight on the ground.

zphx

Another leaf or feather frost

February 14

Another rather warm morning, still more overcast than yesterday’s. There is also another leaf or feather frost on the trees, weeds, and rails, — slight leaves or feathers, a quarter to a half inch long by an eighth wide, standing out around the slightest core. I think it is owing to the warmer nights. At nine last evening and at nine this morning, the thermometer stood at 20°. These ghosts of trees are very handsome and fairy-like.

February 14, 2024

Aunt Louisa says that her cousin Nahum Jones, son to that Nathan whom her mother and sisters visited with her down east, carried a cat to the West Indies, sold his vessel there; and though the same vessel did not return, and he came back in another vessel without the cat, the cat got home to Gouldsboro somehow, unaccountably, about the same time that he did. Captain Woodard told her that he carried the same cat three times round the world.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 14, 1855

Another leaf or feather frost . . . These ghosts of trees are very handsome and fairy-like. See  February 12, 1855 (“All trees covered this morning with a hoar frost, very handsome looking toward the sun, —the ghosts of trees.”);   See also January 1, 1853 ("These ghost-like trees make a scenery which reminds you of Spitzbergen . . . The fine grasses and shrubs in the meadow rise to meet and mingle with the drooping willows, and the whole make an indistinct impression like a mist, and between this the road runs toward those white ice-clad ghostly or fairy trees in the distance, — toward spirit-land.");  January 6, 1853 ("This morning the weeds and twigs and fences were covered with what I may call a leaf frost."); December 31, 1855 ("It is one of the mornings of creation, and the trees, shrubs, etc., etc., are covered with a fine leaf frost, as if they had their morning robes on, seen against the sun. "); Compare February 16, 1854 ("By this time in the winter I do not look for those clear, sparkling mornings and delicate leaf frosts, which, methinks, occur earlier in the winter, as if the air of winter was somewhat tarnished and debauched, — had lost its virgin purity. ")

February 14. See  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, February 14

And another leaf 

or feather frost on the trees –

handsome ghosts of trees.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Another leaf or feather frost 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau 

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-550214