There are various ways in which you can tell if a watermelon is ripe

August 27

. .. I think that some summer squashes had turned yellow in our yard a fortnight or more ago . There are various ways in which you can tell if a watermelon is ripe . If you have had your eye on the patch much from the first , and so know which formed first , you may presume that these will ripen soonest ; or else you may incline to those which lie nearest the centre of the hill or root , as the oldest . Next the dull dead color and want of bloom are as good signs as any . Some look green and livid and have a very fog or mildew of bloom on them , like a fungus . These are as green as a leek through and through , and you'll find yourself in a pickle if you open one . Others have a dead dark green- ness , the circulations being less rapid in their cuticles and their blooming period passed , and these you may safely bet on . If the vine is quite green and lively , the death of the quirl at the root of the stem is almost a sure sign . For fear we should not discover it before , this is placed for a sign that there is redness and ripeness ( if not mealiness ) within . Of two otherwise similar , take that which yields the lowest tone when struck with your knuckles , i . e . , which is hollowest . The old or ripe ones sing base ; the young , tenor or falsetto . Some use the violent method of pressing to hear if they crack within , but this is not to be allowed . Above all no tapping on the vine is to be tolerated , suggestive of a greediness which defeats its own purpose . It is very childish . One man told me that he could n't raise melons because his children would cut them all up . I thought that he convicted himself out of his own mouth , and was not fit to be the ruler of a country according to Confucius ' . . .

See Late Blackberries

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 27, 1859

All our life is a persistent dreaming awake. See November 12, 1859 ("I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?"); October 29, 1857 ("There are some things of which I cannot at once tell whether I have dreamed them or they are real"); August 8, 1852 ("When the play - it may be the tragedy of life - is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.") May 24, 1851 ("I frequently awake with an atmosphere about me as if my unremembered dreams had been divine, as if my spirit had journeyed to its native place”).

I often see yarrow with a delicate pink tint. See July 5, 1856 ("Pink-colored yarrow.")

The children have done bringing huckleberries to sell for nearly a week. See July 13, 1852 ("It is impossible to say what day — almost what week — the huckleberries begin to be ripe, unless you are acquainted with, and daily visit, every huckleberry bush in the town"); August 4, 1852 (“Most huckleberries and blueberries and low blackberries are in their prime now.”); August 4, 1854 ("On this hill (Smith's) the bushes are black with huckleberries. ...Now in their prime. Some glossy black, some dull black, some blue; and patches of Vaccinium vacillans inter mixed."); August 4. 1856 ("This favorable moist weather has expanded some of the huckleberries to the size of bullets"); August 28, 1856 ("Huckleberries are about given up")

Perfectly fresh and large low blackberries, peculiarly sweet and soft, in the shade of the pines at Thrush Alley,-- so much sweeter, tenderer, and larger. See July 31, 1856 (“How thick the berries — low blackberries, Vaccinium vacillans, and huckleberries — on the side of Fair Haven Hill! ”) August 4, 1852 (“Most huckleberries and blueberries and low blackberries are in their prime now.”); August 19, 1856 ("What countless varieties of low blackberries! Here, in this open pine grove, I pluck some large fresh and very sweet ones when they are mostly gone without. So they are continued a little longer to us"); August 28, 1856 (“low blackberries done, high blackberries still to be had.”); 

Elder-berry clusters swell and become heavy and therefore droop, bending the bushes down, just in proportion as they ripen. See   August 22, 1852 ("The elder bushes are weighed down with fruit partially turned, and are still in bloom at the extremities of their twigs."); August 23, 1856  ("Elder-berries, now looking purple, are weighing down the bushes along fences by their abundance."); August 29, 1854 ("The cymes of elder-berries, black with fruit, are now conspicuous.")

The children have done 

bringing huckleberries to sell 

for nearly a week.

A good time to walk in swamps

December 29

Down railroad to Andromeda Ponds. 

I occasionally see a small snowflake in the air against the woods. It is quite cold, and a serious storm seems to be beginning. 

Just before reaching the Cut I see a shrike flying low beneath the level of the railroad, which rises and alights on the topmost twig of an elm within four or five rods. All ash or bluish-slate above down to middle of wings; dirty-white breast, and a broad black mark through eyes on side of head; primaries(?) black, and some white appears when it flies. Most distinctive its small hooked bill (upper mandible).

It makes no sound, but flits to the top of an oak further off. Probably a male. 

Am surprised to find eight or ten acres of Walden still open, notwithstanding the cold of the 26th, 27th, and 28th and of to-day. It must be owing to the wind partly. If quite cold, it will probably freeze to-night. [Not quite. Say the night of the 30th.]

I find in the andromeda bushes in the Andromeda Ponds a great many nests apparently of the red-wing(?) suspended after their fashion amid the twigs of the andromeda, each now filled with ice. I count twenty-one within fifteen rods of a centre, and have no doubt there are a hundred in that large swamp, for I only looked about the edge part way. 

It is remarkable that I do not remember to have seen flocks of these birds there. It is an admirable place for them, these swamps are so impassable and the andromeda so dense. It would seem that they steal away to breed here, are not noisy here as along the river. 

The nests are suspended very securely between eight or ten andromeda stems, about half way up them; made of more or less coarse grass or sedge without, then about half an inch of dense and fine, now frozen sphagnum, then fine wild grass or sedge very regularly, and sometimes another layer of sphagnum and of fine grass above these, the whole an inch thick, the bottom commonly rounded. The outside grasses are well twisted about whatever andromeda stems stand at or near the river. I saw the traces of mice in some of them.

I never knew, or rather do not remember, the crust so strong and hard as it is now and has been for three days. You can skate over it as on ice in any direction. I see the tracks of skaters on all the roads, and they seem hardly to prefer the ice. 

Above Abiel Wheeler’s, on the back road, the crust is not broken yet, though many sleds and sleighs have passed. The tracks of the skaters are as conspicuous as any there. But the snow is but trim or three inches deep. 

Jonas Potter tells me that he has known the crust on snow two feet deep to be as strong as this, so that he could drive his sled anywhere over the walls; so that he cut off the trees in Jenny’s lot three feet from the ground, and cut again after the snow was melted. 

When two men, Billings and Prichard, were dividing the stock of my father and Hurd, the former acting for Father, P. was rather tight for Hurd. They came to a cracked bowl, at which P. hesitated and asked, “Well, what shall we do with this?” B. took it in haste and broke it, and, presenting him one piece, said, “There, that is your half and this is ours.” 

A good time to walk in swamps, there being ice but no snow to speak of, — all crust. It is a good walk along the edge of the river, the wild side, amid the button-bushes and willows. 

The eupatorium stalks still stand there, with their brown hemispheres of little twigs, orreries. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 29, 1855

A  shrike . . . rises and alights on the topmost twig of an elm. See  December 30, 1859 ("I see a shrike perched on the tip-top of the topmost upright twig of an English cherry tree . . . square on the topmost bud, balancing himself by a slight motion of his tail from time to time. I have noticed this habit of the bird before. . . . It flew toward a young elm, whose higher twigs were much more slender. . . to my surprise, he alighted without any trouble upon the very top of one of the highest of all, and looked around as before. ") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The  Northern Shrike

Eight or ten acres of Walden still open. See December 30, 1853 ("[Walden] not yet frozen entirely over; about six acres open, the wind blew so hard last night.”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  First Ice

A great many nests apparently of the red-wing suspended after their fashion . . . each now filled with ice. See May 16, 1854 ("Red-wing blackbirds' nests which are now being built,. . . are generally hung between two twigs."); May 20, 1853 ("Probably a red-wing blackbird's nest, of grass, hung between two button-bushes.")  See also  December 24, 1851 ("Now and long since the birds' nests have been full of snow."); December 30, 1855 (“He who would study birds’ nests must look for them in November and in winter as well as in midsummer, for then the trees are bare and he can see them, and the swamps and streams are frozen and he can approach new kinds”)

I never knew . . . the crust so strong and hard as it is now and has been for three days. You can skate over it as on ice in any direction. See February 19, 1855 ("Rufus Hosmer says that in the year 1820 there was so smooth and strong an icy crust on a very deep snow that you could skate everywhere over the fields.")

A good time to walk in swamps, there being ice but no snow to speak of, — all crust. See December 6, 1856 ("I can walk through the spruce swamp now dry-shod, amid the water andromeda and Kalmia glauca."); December 22, 1850 ("In winter I can explore the swamps and ponds . . . I see more tracks in the swamps than elsewhere."); February 13, 1859 ("Winter comes to make walking possible where there was no walking in summer."); February 19, 1854 ("I incline to walk now in swamps and on the river and ponds, where I cannot walk in summer.") See also December 13, 1856 ("My first true winter walk is perhaps that which I take on the river, or where I cannot go in the summer. It is the walk peculiar to winter, and now first I take it.");  August 22, 1854 ("I go again to the Great Meadows, to improve this remarkably dry season and walk where in ordinary times I cannot go. There is, no doubt, a particular season of the year when each place may be visited with most profit and pleasure, and it may be worth the while to consider what that season is in each case.")

A good time to walk 

in swamps there being ice but 

no snow to speak of.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, A good time to walk in swamps

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-551229

Midwinter travel; missing lives and landmarks

February 19.

Rufus Hosmer says that in the year 1820 there was so smooth and strong an icy crust on a very deep snow that you could skate everywhere over the fields and for the most part over the fences. Sam Potter’s father, moving into town, turned off into the fields with a four-horse team as soon as he had crossed Wood’s Bridge and went directly across to Deacon Hubbard’s.

When Wood’s Bridge was carried off up stream, it was landed against Hubbard’s land. Showed me where his grandfather, Nathan Hosmer, who lived in the old house still standing on Conantum, was drowned when crossing the river on the ice from town, just below the bridge since built.

The water is about a foot deep on the Jimmy Miles road. E. Conant thinks that the Joe Miles causeway is rather worse than Hubbard’s in respect to water. Conant was cutting up an old pear tree which had blown down by his old house on Conantum. This and others still standing, and a mulberry tree whose stump remains, were set anciently with reference to a house which stood in the little peach orchard near by. 

The only way for Conant to come to town when the water is highest is by Tarbell’s and Wood’s on the stone bridge, about a mile and a half round. 

It is true when there is no snow we cannot so easily see the birds, nor they the weeds.

Many will complain of my lectures that they are transcendental. “Can’t understand them.” “Would you have us return to the savage state?” etc., etc. A criticism true enough, it may be, from their point of view. 

But the fact is, the earnest lecturer can speak only to his like, and the adapting of himself to his audience is a mere compliment which he pays them. 

If you wish to know how I think, you must endeavor to put yourself in my place. If you wish me to speak as if I were you, that is another affair. 

I think it was about a week ago that I saw some dead honey-bees on the snow. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 19, 1855

Rufus Hosmer says that in the year 1820 there was so smooth and strong an icy crust on a very deep snow that you could skate everywhere over the fields and for the most part over the fences. See December 29, 1855 ("Jonas Potter tells me that he has known the crust on snow two feet deep to be as strong as this, so that he could drive his sled anywhere over the walls.")

Showed me where his grandfather, Nathan Hosmer, who lived in the old house still standing on Conantum, was drowned when crossing the river on the ice. See February 12, 1860 ("Next above Good Fishing Bay and where the man was drowned, I pass Black Rock Shore, and over the Deep Causeway I come to Drifted Meadow.")

I think it was about a week ago that I saw some dead honey-bees on the snow. See February 10, 1852 ("I saw yesterday on the snow on the ice, on the south side of Fair Haven Pond, some hundreds of honey-bees, dead and sunk half an inch below the crust.")

Many will complain of my lectures that they are transcendental. See February 13, 1860 ("Read to them a lecture on "Education," naming that subject, and they will think that they have heard some thing important, but call it "Transcendentalism," and they will think it moonshine.")