A Book of the seasons: December 15 (weeds, winter eve, life)

The year is but a succession of days,

and I see that I could assign some office to each day

which, summed up, would be the history of the year.

Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852

December 15.

December 15, 2018

My love is invulnerable. 

Meet me on that ground

and you will find me strong.

December 15, 1841

The bare landscape looks

as if covered with snow on

these bright moonlit nights.

December 15, 1853

A few clean dry weeds

seen against smooth reflecting

water between ice.

December 15, 1854

The low grass and weeds

bent down with crystalline drops

now ready to freeze.

December 15, 1855

The now dark green pines.

The oak leaves and withered weeds

bleached above the snow.

The hushed stillness of

the wood at sundown, aye

all the winter day.

Smooth serenity

and reflections of the pond,

alone free from ice.

Hooting of the owl

with the distant whistle of

a locomotive.

The last strokes of the

woodchopper who presently

bends his steps homeward.

Gilded bar of cloud

conducting my thoughts into

the eternal west.

The horizon glow,

and the hasty walk homeward.

Long winter evening.

December 15, 1856

And the trees have all

come down to the bank to see

the river go by.

December 15, 1841

December 15, 2023

A mild summer sun shines, over forest and lake. December 15, 1841

In the woods there is an inexpressible happiness. December 15, 1841.

The trees have come down to the bank to see the river go by. December 15, 1841

The water which so calmly reflects the fleeting clouds and the primeval trees I have never seen before. December 15, 1841

This old, familiar river is renewed each instant; only the channel is the same. December 15, 1841

This morning it has begun to snow apparently in earnest. December 15, 1855

The air is quite thick and the view confined. December 15, 1855

The first kind of snow-storm, or that of yesterday, which ceased in the night after some three inches had fallen, was that kind that makes handsome drifts behind the walls. December 15, 1859

There are no drifts equal to these behind loosely built stone walls, the wind passing between the stones. December 15, 1859

Slight as this snow was, these drifts now extend back four or five feet and as high as the wall, on the north side of the Corner Bridge road. December 15, 1859

It is quite still, yet some flakes come down from one side and some from another, crossing each other like woof and warp apparently, as they are falling in different eddies and currents of air. December 15, 1855

In the midst of it, I hear and see a few little chickadees prying about the twigs of the locusts in the graveyard. December 15, 1855

They have come into town with the snow. December 15, 1855

They now and then break forth into a short sweet strain, and then seem suddenly to check them selves, as if they had done it before they thought. December 15, 1855

The snow turns to rain, and this afternoon I walk in it down the railroad and through the woods. December 15, 1855

The boys have skated a little within two or three days, but it has not been thick enough to bear a man yet. December 15, 1855

I see on the ice, half a dozen rods from shore, a small brown striped grub, and again a black one five eighths of an inch long. The last has apparently melted quite a cavity in the ice. How came they there? December 15, 1854

How interesting a few clean, dry weeds on the shore a dozen rods off, seen distinctly against the smooth, reflecting water between ice! December 15, 1854

The low grass and weeds, bent down with a myriad little crystalline drops, ready to be frozen perhaps, are very interesting, but wet my feet through very soon. December 15, 1855

I seem to see somewhat more of my own kith and kin in the lichens on the rocks than in any books. December 15, 1841

A steady but gentle, warm rain. December 15, 1855

It still blows hard at 2 p. m., but it is not cold. December 15, 1856

8 p.m.. . .The high northwest wind of this morning, with what of cold we have, has made some of those peculiar rake-toothed icicles on the dead twigs, etc., about the edge of the pond at the east end. December 15, 1856

To produce this phenomenon is required only open water, a high wind, and sufficiently cold weather to freeze the spray. December 15, 1856

I still recall to mind that characteristic winter eve of December 9th; the cold, dry, and wholesome diet my mind and senses necessarily fed on, —

• oak leaves, bleached and withered weeds that rose above the snow,
• the now dark green of the pines, and
• perchance the faint metallic chip of a single tree sparrow;
• the hushed stillness of the wood at sundown, aye, all the winter day;
• the short boreal twilight;
• the smooth serenity and the reflections of the pond, still alone free from ice;
• the melodious hooting of the owl, heard at the same time with
• the yet more distant whistle of a locomotive,. . .
• the last strokes of the woodchopper,who presently bends his steps homeward;
• the gilded bar of cloud across the apparent outlet of the pond,
• conducting my thoughts into the eternal west;
• the deepening horizon glow; and
• the hasty walk homeward to enjoy the long winter evening.

December 15, 1856

December 15, 2023

The hooting of the owl! That is a sound which my red predecessors heard here more than a thousand years ago. December 15, 1856

It rings far and wide, occupying the spaces rightfully, — grand, primeval, aboriginal sound. December 15, 1856

Saw a small flock of geese go over. December 15, 1852

Looking from my window these bright moonlight nights, the ground being still bare, the whole landscape — fields, road, and roof — has a wintry aspect, as if covered with snow. It is the frost. December 15, 1853

It does seem as if mine were a peculiarly wild nature, which so yearns toward all wildness. December 15, 1841

One's life, the enterprise he is here upon, should certainly be a grand fact to consider . . . A man should not live without a purpose, and that purpose must surely be a grand one. December 15, 1852

My love is invulnerable. December 15, 1841

December 15, 2019

*****

December 15, 2023

Li Po (There is bright moonlight so that it seems like frost on the ground")
Walden ("To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”)
Walden ("Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.")

December 15, 2023

April 29, 1852 (“The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.”)
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, ")
August 30, 1856 (“Many of our days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars, but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him. Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry that you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy”)
September 8, 1858 ("It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else.”)
October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”)
November 12, 1853 ("The meadows . . . look as if covered with frost in the moonlight.")
November 13, 1858 (“We looked out the window at 9 P. M. and saw the ground for the most part white with the first sugaring, which at first we could hardly tell from a mild moonlight.")
November 18, 1857 "Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of.”)
November 18, 1851(".Now at sundown I hear the hooting of an owl, — hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo.. . . It is a sound admirably suited to the swamp and to the twilight woods, suggesting a vast undeveloped nature . . . I rejoice that there are owls. They represent the stark, twilight, unsatisfied thoughts I have. . . This sound faintly suggests the infinite roominess of nature, that there is a world in which owls live.") 

November 28, 1853 ("Boys skating in Cambridgeport, — the first ice to bear.")
December 1, 1857 ("I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.”)
December 6, 1854 ("I see thick ice and boys skating all the way to Providence, but know not when it froze, I have been so busy writing my lecture.")
December 6, 1855 ("10 P. M. — Hear geese going over.”)
December 9, 1856 ("I hear only the strokes of a lingering woodchopper at a distance, and the melodious hooting of an owl, which is as common and marked a sound as the axe or the locomotive whistle."

)December 9, 1856 ("The sun is near setting, away beyond Fair Haven. A bewitching stillness reigns through all the woodland and over the snow-clad landscape. Indeed, the winter day in the woods or fields has commonly the stillness of twilight. The pond is perfectly smooth and full of light. . . .Such is a winter eve")
December 10, 1856 ("the apparently full moon has fairly commenced her reign, and I go home by her light.")
December 10, 1856 ("The nights are light on account of the snow, and, there being a moon, there is no distinct interval between the day and night.")
December 11, 1854 (“The day is short; it seems to be composed of two twilights merely.”)
December 12, 1851 ("I wish for leisure and quiet to let my life flow in its proper channels, with its proper currents; when I might not waste the days.")
December 13, 1858 ("And on those fine grass heads which are bent over in the path the fine dew-like drops are frozen separately like a string of beads")
December 13, 1855 ("The countless flakes, seen against the dark evergreens like a web that is woven in the air, impart a cheerful and busy aspect to nature.")
.December 14, 1851 ("The chickadees remind me of Hudson's Bay for some reason. I look on them as natives of a more northern latitude")
December 14. 1851 ("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.")
December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. . . .That of the 11th was a still storm, of large flakes falling gently in the quiet air, like so many white feathers descending in different directions when seen against a wood-side, . . . A myriad falling flakes weaving a coarse garment by which the eye is amused.”)
December 14, 1854 ("Your eye slides first over a plane surface of smooth ice of one color to a water surface of silvery smoothness, like a gem set in ice, and reflecting the weeds and trees and houses and clouds with singular beauty. The reflections are particularly simple and distinct.")
December 14, 1859 ("This is a fine, dry snow, drifting nearly horizontally from the north")
December 14, 1855 (" Looking more closely at the light snow... I found that it was sprinkled all over ... with regular star-shaped cottony flakes with six points, about an eighth of an inch in diameter and on an average a half an inch apart. It snowed geometry.")

December 16, 1852 ("Observe the reflection of the snow on Pine Hill from Walden")
December 16, 1855 ("Steady, gentle, warm rain all the forenoon, and mist and mizzling in the afternoon,")
December 16, 1855 ("As we go over the bridge, admire the reflection of the trees and houses from the smooth open water over the channel, where the ice has been dissolved by the rain.")
December 19, 1854 (" Last night was so cold that the river closed up almost everywhere, and made good skating where there had been no ice to catch the snow of the night before.")
December 20, 1854 ( P. M. — Skate to Fair Haven.”)
December 20, 1854 ("If there is a grub out, you are sure to detect it on the snow or ice.")

December 20, 1856 ("Rain more or less all day.")
December 20, 1855 ("A few chickadees busily inspecting the buds at the willow-row ivy tree, for insects, with a short, clear chink from time to time, as if to warn me of their neighborhood")
December 22, 1855 ("Warm rain and frost coming out and muddy walking.")
December 23, 1851 ("Gradually the sun sinks, the air grows more dusky, and I perceive that if it were not for the light reflected from the snow it would be quite dark. The woodchopper has started for home.")
December 28 1852 ("Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe,")
December 28, 1858 ("I notice a few chickadees there in the edge of the pines, in the sun, lisping and twittering cheerfully to one another, with a reference to me, I think, — the cunning and innocent little birds. ")

December 29, 1841 ("One does not soon learn the trade of life. That one may work out a true life requires more art and delicate skill than any other work.")

Hearing the whistle

of the locomotive takes

me out of body.

I see clearly what

at other times I only

dimly remember.

The earth's extent

the freedom of all nature

and the sky's depth.

December 31, 1853

January 11, 1852 ("Let me not live as if time was short")

December 15, 2014

If you make the least correct

observation of nature this year,

 you will have occasion to repeat it

 with illustrations the next, 

and the season and life itself is prolonged.

  April 7, 1853 

December 15

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, December 15

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 © 2009-2023

tinyurl.com/hdt15dec

A fuller view of Wachusett

August 25.

Warmer to-day. Surveying Tuttle’s farm.

From the extreme eastern side of his farm, looking up the valley of the Mill Brook, in which direction it is about two miles to anything that can be called high ground (say at E. Wood’s), I was surprised to see the whole outline and greater part of the base of Wachusett, though you stand in a low meadow. 

Wachusett from Fair Haven Hill, August 2, 1852

It is because of the great distance of the hills westward. It is a fuller view of this mountain than many of our hills afford. Seen through this lower stratum, the mountain is a very dark blue.

I am struck by the rank growth of weeds at this season. Passing over Tuttle’s farm, only one field removed from the Turnpike, where various kinds of tall, rank weeds are rampant, half concealing the lusty crops, — low ground which has only been cultivated twice before, where turnips and algæ (?) contend for places, fire-weeds (senecio), thoroughwort, Eupatorium purpureum, and giant asters, etc., suggest a vigor in the soil, an Ohio fertility, which I was not prepared for, which on the sandy turnpike I had not suspected, — it seemed to me that I had not enough frequented and considered the products, perchance, of these fertile grounds which the farmers have enriched.

He is continually selecting a virgin soil and adding the contents of his barn-yards to it.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 25, 1853

Seen through this lower stratum, the mountain is a very dark blue. See November 13, 1851("The mountains are of an uncommonly dark blue to-day. Perhaps this is owing . . . to the greater clearness of the atmosphere, which brings them nearer"); March 31, 1853 ("It is affecting to see a distant mountain-top,. . . still as blue and ethereal to your eyes as is your memory of it.'); September 27, 1853 ("From our native hills we look out easily to the far blue mountains, which seem to preside over them."); December 27, 1853 ("The outline of the mountains is wonderfully distinct and hard, and they are a dark blue and very near. Wachusett looks like a right whale over our bow, plowing the continent, with his flukes well down")

Tuttle’s farm, where various kinds of tall, rank weeds are rampant. See August 26, 1853 ("The fall dandelion is as conspicuous and abundant now in Tuttle's meadow as buttercups in the spring. It takes their place")

What a change there will be in a few years, this little forest of goldenrod giving place to a forest of pines!

December 17.

P. M. — To Walden.

The snow being some three or four inches deep, I see rising above it, generally, at my old bean-field, only my little white pines set last spring in the midst of an immense field of Solidago nemoralis, with a little sweet-fern (i.e. a large patch of it on the north side).

What a change there will be in a few years, this little forest of goldenrod giving place to a forest of pines!

By the side of the Pout's Nest, I see on the pure white snow what looks like dust for half a dozen inches under a twig. Looking closely, I find that the twig is hardhack and the dust its slender, light-brown, chaffy looking seed, which falls still in copious showers, dusting the snow, when I jar it; and here are the tracks of a sparrow which has jarred the twig and picked the minute seeds a long time, making quite a hole in the snow. The seeds are so fine that it must have got more snow than seed at each peck. But they probably look large to its microscopic eyes.

I see, when I jar it, that a meadow-sweet close by has quite similar, but larger, seeds.

This the reason, then, that these plants rise so high above the snow and retain their seed, dispersing it on the least jar over each successive layer of snow beneath them; or it is carried to a distance by the wind.

What abundance and what variety in the diet of these small granivorous birds, while I find only a few nuts still!

These stiff weeds which no snow can break down hold their provender. What the cereals are to men, these are to the sparrows. The only threshing they require is that the birds fly against their spikes or stalks.

A little further I see the seed-box (?) (Ludwigia) full of still smaller, yellowish seeds.

And on the ridge north is the track of a partridge amid the shrubs. It has hopped up to the low clusters of smooth sumach berries, sprinkled the snow with them, and eaten all but a few. Also, here only, or where it has evidently jarred them down — whether intentionally or not, I am not sure — are the large oval seeds of the stiff-stalked lespedeza, which I suspect it ate, with the sumach berries. There is much solid food in them. When the snow is deep the birds could easily pick the latter out of the heads as they stand on the snow.

I observe, then, eaten by birds to-day, the seed of hardhack and meadow-sweet, sumach, and probably lespedeza, and even seed-box.

Under the hill, on the southeast side of R. W. E.'s lot, where the hemlock stands, I see many tracks of squirrels. The dark, thick green of the hemlock (amid the pines) seems to attract them as a covert. The snow under the hemlock is strewn with the scales of its cones, which they (and perhaps birds?) have stripped off, and some of its little winged seeds. It is pleasant to see the tracks of these squirrels (I am not sure whether they are red or gray or both, for I see none) leading straight from the base of one tree to that of another, thus leaving untrodden triangles, squares, and polygons of every form, bounded by much trodden highways.

One, two, three, and the track is lost on the upright bole of a pine, — as if they had played at base-running from goal to goal, while pine cones were thrown at them on the way. The tracks of two or three suggest a multitude. You come thus on the tracks of these frisky and volatile (semivolitant) creatures in the midst of perfect stillness and solitude, as you might stand in a hall half an hour after the dancers had departed.

I see no nests in the trees, but numerous holes through the snow into the earth, whence they have emerged. They have loitered but little on the snow, spending their time chiefly on the trees, their castles, when abroad.

The snow is strewn not only with hemlock scales, but, under other trees, with the large white pine scales for rods together where there is no track, the wind having scattered them as they fell, and also the shells of hickory-nuts. It reminds me of the platform before a grocery where nuts are sold.

You see many places where they have probed the snow for these white pine cones, evidently those which they cut off green and which accordingly have not opened so as to drop the seeds. This was perhaps the design in cut ting them off so early, — thus to preserve them under the snow (not dispersed). Do they find them by the scent?

At any rate they will dig down through the snow and come right upon a pine cone or a hickory-nut or an acorn, which you and I cannot do.

Two or three acres of Walden, off the bar, not yet frozen.

Saw in [it] a good-sized black duck, which did not dive while I looked. I suspect it must have been a Fuligula, though I saw no white.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 17, 1859

What abundance and what variety in the diet of these small granivorous birds. These stiff weeds which no snow can break down hold their provender.  See January 16, 1860 ("Though you may have never noticed this shrub, the tree sparrow comes from the north in the winter straight to it, and confidently shakes its panicle, and then feasts on the fine shower of seed that falls from it. The bird understands how to get its dinner perfectly.")

Two or three acres of Walden, off the bar, not yet frozen. Saw in it a good-sized black duck. See December 27, 1852 ("Not a particle of ice in Walden to-day. . . . A black and white duck on it, Flint's and Fair Haven being frozen up.")

Early rising and a morning walk.

December 13

Walk early through the woods to Lincoln to survey. 

Winter weather may be said to have begun yesterday. River and ponds all open. Goose Pond skimmed over. 

Why have I ever omitted early rising and a morning walk? 

As we walked over the Cedar Hill, Mr. Weston asked me if I had ever noticed how the frost formed around a particular weed in the grass, and no other. It was a clear cold morning. We stooped to examine, and I observed, about the base of the larger pin-weed [cistus], the frost formed into little flattened trumpets or bells, an inch or more long, with the mouth down about the base of the stem. They were very conspicuous, dotting the grass white. But what was most remarkable was that, though there were plenty of other dead weeds and grasses about, no other species exhibited this phenomenon. 

I think it can hardly be because of the form of its top, and that therefore the moisture is collected and condensed and flows down its stem particularly. It may have something to do with the life of the root, which I noticed was putting forth shoots beneath. Perhaps this growth generates heat and so steam. He said that his cows never touched that weed. 

I judge from his account of the rise and fall of Flint's Pond that, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlet, it sympathizes with Walden. 

I observed a mouse run down a bush by the pond-side. I approached and found that he had neatly covered over a thrasher or other bird's nest (it was made partly of sticks like a thrasher's), about four or five feet from the ground, and lined it warmly with that common kind of green moss (?) which grows about the base of oaks, but chiefly with a kind [of] vegetable wool, perhaps from the wool-grass. He appeared to be a reddish brown above and cream-colored beneath, and ran swiftly down the stems. I think it must be the Gerbillus Canadensis, or perhaps the Arvicola Emmonsii, or maybe the Arvicola hirsutus, meadow mouse.

Began to snow at noon. This the third snow; the first lasted half an hour on ground; the second, two or three days.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 13, 1852

Why have I ever omitted early rising and a morning walk? See  December 13, 1851 ("It seems an age since I took walks and wrote in my journal.");  See also January 10, 1851 ("I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of taking walks daily."); February 25, 1859 ("Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring.”); Walden (“To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say . . . Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.”)

About the base of the [cicstus] the frost formed into little flattened trumpets or bells, an inch or more long, with the mouth down about the base of the stem. See November 11, 1858 ("Frost. . . forming a sort of fool’s cap of different thicknesses, or cockles, or sugar-plums. It seems it is so cool that the frost about the cistus does not melt all day."); See also November 18, 1855 ("Now first mark the stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. They have suddenly acquired a new character."); November 20, 1858 ("The cinnamon-brown of withered pinweeds (how long?) colors whole fields."); November 30, 1856 ("Several inches of snow . . . Now see . . . the rich brown-fruited pinweed above the crust."); December 5 1856 ("The johnswort and the larger pinweed are conspicuous above the snow.");  December 6, 1856 ("Each pinweed, etc., has melted a little hollow or rough cave in the snow, in which the lower part at least snugly hides . . . What variety the pinweeds, clear brown seedy plants, give to the fields, which are yet but shallowly covered with snow! . . . Not till the snow comes are the beauty and variety and richness of vegetation ever fully revealed."); December 23, 1859 ("The pinweed — the larger (say thymifolia) — pods open, showing their three pretty leather-brown inner divisions open like a little calyx, a third or half containing still the little hemispherical or else triangular red dish-brown seeds.")

Pinweed (GoBotany)

I judge from his account of the rise and fall of Flint's Pond that, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlet, it sympathizes with Walden. See December 5, 1852 ("Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it is . . . distantly and indirectly related to Flint's Pond, which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter"); November 26, 1858 (“Walden is very low, compared with itself for some years . . . and what is remarkable, I find that not only Goose Pond also has fallen correspondingly within a month, but even the smaller pond-holes only four or five rods over, such as Little Goose Pond, shallow as they are. I begin to suspect, therefore, that this rise and fall extending through a long series of years is not peculiar to the Walden system of ponds, but is true of ponds generally, and perhaps of rivers”)

River and ponds all open. Goose Pond skimmed over. See  December 13, 1850 (“The river froze over last night, — skimmed over;”);   December 13, 1857 ("[Goose Pond] and the like ponds are just covered with virgin ice just thick enough to bear, though it cracks about the edges on the sunny 'sides.’’); December 13, 1859 (“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.”);  See also December 4, 1853 ("Goose Pond apparently froze over last night, all but a few rods, but not thick enough to bear.”); December 8, 1853 ("Goose Pond now firmly frozen.”); December 27, 1857 ("Goose Pond is not thickly frozen yet . . . in many places water has oozed out and spread over the ice, mixing with the snow and making dark places.”)

He had neatly covered over a bird's nest and lined it warmly with  green moss. See  February 3, 1856 (“Track some mice to a black willow by riverside, just above spring, against the open swamp; and about three feet high, in apparently an old woodpecker’s hole, was probably the mouse-nest, a double handful, consisting, four ninths, of fine shreds of inner bark, perhaps willow or maple; three ninths, the greenish moss, apparently, of button-bush; two ninths, the gray-slate fur, apparently, of rabbits or mice."); February 18, 1857 ("Picked up a mouse-nest in the stubble at Hubbard's mountain sumachs, left bare by the melting snow. It is about five inches wide and three or four high, with one, if not two, small round indistinct entrances on the side . . . It is made very firmly and round, far more so than an oven-bird's nest, of the rye and grass stubble which was at hand under the snow, gnawed off to convenient lengths. A very snug and warm nest, where several might have lain very cosily under the snow in the hardest winter . . . Is it not the nest of a different mouse from the Mus leucopus of the woods?") See also note to October 8, 1853 (“Find a bird's nest converted into a mouse's nest ”)

Maybe the Arvicola hirsutus, meadow mouse. Compare August 25, 1858 (“The short-tailed meadow mouse, or Arvicola hirsuta. . . . above, it is very dark brown, almost blackish, being browner forward. It is also dark beneath.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Mouse ("Most of Thoreau's observations of wild mice are either the meadow mouse or deer mouse.  Thoreau calls the meadow mouse or  "short-tailed meadow mouse," Arvicola hirsuta -- now known as Microtus  pennsylvanicus,  meadow Vole.")

Winter weather may be said to have begun yesterday . . . Began to snow at noon. This the third snow; the first lasted half an hour on ground; the second, two or three days. See November 16, 1852 ("Colder weather and very windy, but still no snow."); November 23, 1852 ("This morning the ground is white with snow, and it still snows. This is the first time it has been fairly white this season, though once before, many weeks ago, it was slightly whitened for ten or fifteen minutes.”) Νου.  29, 30, and Dec. 1, 1852 ("The snow which fell the 23d whitened the ground but a day or two." December 1, 1852 ("The snow keeps off unusually."); December 2, 1852 ("Still no snow."); December 12, 1852 ("Cold at last . . . I see snow on the mountains. Last night's rain was snow there, then.)"

Why have I ever 

omitted early rising 

and a morning walk?

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  Early rising and a morning walk

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/hdt521213

An ancient cellar is uncovered.

September 22.

A mizzling day, with less rain than yesterday, filling the streams.

As I went past the Hunt cellar, where Hosmer pulled down the old house in the spring, I thought I would see if any new or rare plants had sprung up in that place which had so long been covered from the light. 

I was surprised to find there Urtica wrens (?), very fresh and in bloom, one to three feet high, with ovate deeply cut leaves, which I never saw before; also Nicotiana, probably Tabacum (not the wild one), in flower, and Anethum graveolens (?), or dill, also in flower. 

I had not seen either of the last two growing spontaneously in Concord before. It is remarkable that tobacco should have sprung up there. Could the seed have been preserved from a time when it was cultivated there? [I learn that it was formerly cultivated in Concord, but Temple, who has raised a little for two years past a mile and a quarter west of this, thinks he is the only one who has cultivated any in C. of late years.] Also the Solanum nigrum, which is rare in Concord, with many flowers and green fruit. 

The prevailing plants in and about this cellar were mallows, Urtica urens, rich-weed (very rank), catnep, Chenopodium Botrys, Solanum nigrum, chickweed, Bidens frondosa, etc. 

It is remarkable what a curse seems to attach to any place which has long been inhabited by man. Vermin of various kinds abide with him. It is said that the site of Babylon is a desert where the lion and the jackal prowl. If, as here, an ancient cellar is uncovered, there springs up at once a crop of rank and noxious weeds, evidence of a certain unwholesome fertility, — by which perchance the earth relieves herself of the poisonous qualities which have been imparted to her.  As if what was foul, baleful, grovelling, or obscene in the inhabitants had sunk into the earth and infected it. 

Certain qualities are there in excess in the soil, and the proper equilibrium will not be attained until after the sun and air have purified the spot. The very shade breeds saltpetre. Yet men value this kind of earth highly and will pay a price for it, as if it were as good a soil for virtue as for vice. 

In other places you find henbane and the Jamestown-weed and the like, in cellars, — such herbs as the witches are said to put into their caldron. It would be fit that the tobacco plant should spring up on the house-site, aye on the grave, of almost every householder of Concord. 

These vile weeds are sown by vile men. 

When the house is gone they spring up in the corners of cellars where the cider-casks stood always on tap, for murder and all kindred vices will out. And that rank crowd which lines the gutter, where the wash of the dinner dishes flows, are but more distant parasites of the host. 

What obscene and poisonous weeds, think you, will mark the site of a Slave State? — what kind of Jamestown-weed? There are mallows for food, — for cheeses, at least; rich-weed for high living; the nettle for domestic felicity, — a happy disposition; black nightshade, tobacco, henbane, and Jamestown-weed as symbols of the moral atmosphere and influences of that house, the idiocy and insanity of it; dill and Jerusalem-oak and catnep for senility grasping at a straw; and beggar-ticks for poverty.

I see the fall dandelions all closed in the rain this afternoon. Do they, then, open only in fair or cloudy forenoons and cloudy afternoons? 

There is mallow with its pretty little button-shaped fruit, which children eat and call cheeses, — eaten green. There are several such fruits discoverable and edible by children. 

The mountain-ash trees are alive with robins and cherry-birds nowadays, stripping them of their fruit (in drooping clusters). It is exceedingly bitter and austere to my taste. Such a tree fills the air with the watch-spring-like note of the cherry-birds coming and going.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 22, 1859

As I went past the Hunt cellar, where Hosmer pulled down the old house in the spring. See note to September 21, 1855 ("Stopped at the old Hunt house")

I see the fall dandelions all closed in the rain this afternoon. Do they, then, open only in fair or cloudy forenoons and cloudy afternoons? See September 1, 1859 ("The autumnal dandelion is a prevailing flower now, but since it shuts up in the afternoon it might not be known as common unless you were out in the morning or in a dark afternoon."); September 11, 1859 ("This being a cloudy and somewhat rainy day, the autumnal dandelion is open in the afternoon."); November 4, 1855 ("The autumnal dandelion sheltered by this apple-tree trunk is drooping and half closed and shows but half its yellow, this dark, late wet day in the fall.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Autumnal Dandelion

The mountain-ash trees are alive with robins and cherry-birds nowadays. See September 1, 1859 ("The cherry-birds and robins seem to know the locality of every wild cherry in the town.")

Like a snow-storm they come rushing down from the north.

December. 12 

P. M. — Up river on ice to Fair Haven Hill. 

The snow bunting (Emberiza nivalis) methinks it is, so white and arctic

Crossing the fields west of our Texas house, I see an immense flock of snow buntings, I think the largest that I ever saw. There must be a thousand or two at least. There is but three inches, at most, of crusted and dry frozen snow, and they are running amid the weeds which rise above it. 

The weeds are chiefly Juncus tenuis (?), but its seeds are apparently gone. I find, however, the glumes of the piper grass scattered about where they have been. 

The flock is at first about equally divided into two parts about twenty rods apart, but birds are incessantly flitting across the interval to join the pioneer flock, until all are united. They are very restless, running amid the weeds and continually changing their ground. They will suddenly rise again a few seconds after they have alighted, as if alarmed, but after a short wheel settle close by. 

Flying from you, in some positions, you see only or chiefly the black part of their bodies, and then, as they wheel, the white comes into view, contrasted prettily with the former, and in all together at the same time. 

Seen flying higher against a cloudy sky they look like large snowflakes. 

When they rise all together their note is like the rattling of nuts in a bag, as if a whole binful were rolled from side to side. They also utter from time to time — i. e., individuals do — a clear rippling note, perhaps of alarm, or a call. It is remarkable that their notes above described should resemble the lesser redpolls'! 

Away goes this great wheeling, rambling flock, rolling through the air, and you cannot easily tell where they will settle. Suddenly the pioneers (or a part not foremost) will change their course when in full career, and when at length they know it, the rushing flock on the other side will be fetched about as it were with an undulating jerk, as in the boys’ game of snap-the-whip, and those that occupy the place of the snapper are gradually off after their leaders on the new tack.

As far as I observe, they confine themselves to upland, not alighting in the meadows. Like a snow-storm they come rushing down from the north. The extremities of the wings are black, while the parts next their bodies are black [sic]. They are unusually abundant now. 

See a shrike on a dead pine at the Cliffs.

The pitch pines have not done falling, considerable having fallen on the snow. 

The river meadows, where they were not cut, are conspicuous brown-straw-colored now,— in the sun almost a true straw-color. November lingers still there. 

I should like to know where all those snowbirds will roost to-night, for they will probably roost together. And what havoc an owl might make among them! [Melvin tells me that he saw a thousand feeding a long time in the Great Meadows, — he thinks on the seeds of the wool-grass (!!), — about same time.]

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 12, 1858


Snow buntings. See  November 7, 1858 ("Going up the lane beyond Farmer’s, I was surprised to see fly up from the white, stony road, two snow buntings, which alighted again close by, one on a large rock, the other on the stony ground. They had pale-brown or tawny touches on the white breast, on each side of the head, and on the top of the head, in the last place with some darker color. Had light-yellowish bills. They sat quite motionless within two rods, and allowed me to approach within a rod, as if conscious that the white rocks, etc., concealed them. It seemed as if they were attracted to surfaces of the same color with themselves, — white and black (or quite dark) and tawny. One squatted flat, if not both. Their soft rippling notes as they went off reminded me [of] the northeast snow-storms to which ere long they are to be an accompaniment."); November 29, 1859 ("Saw quite a flock of snow buntings not yet very white. They rose from the midst of a stubble-field unexpectedly. The moment they settled after wheeling around, they were perfectly concealed, though quite near, and I could only hear their rippling note from the earth from time to time. "); December 10, 1854 (" See a large flock of snow buntings (quite white against woods, at any rate), though it is quite warm. ");  December 24, 1851 ("Saw a flock of snowbirds on the Walden road. I see them so commonly when it is beginning to snow that I am inclined to regard them as a sign of a snow-storm. The snow bunting (Emberiza nivalis) methinks it is, so white and arctic, not the slate-colored.."); January 2, 1856") ("They have come with this deeper snow and colder weather."). See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Snow Bunting

Snow buntings flying

high against a cloudy sky

looking like snowflakes.

Snow buntings rising

this great wheeling rambling flock –

where will they settle?

The first glaze we have had this year.

February 6 

9 a. m. — Down railroad to see the glaze, the first we have had this year, but not a very good one. 

It is about a fifth or a sixth of an inch thick on the northeast sides of twigs, etc., not transparent, but of an opaque white, granular character. 

The woods, especially wooded hillsides half a mile or more distant, have a rich, hoary, frosted look, still and stiff, yet it is not so thick but that the green of the pines and the yellow of the willow bark and the leather-color of oak leaves show through it. These colors are pleasantly toned down. 

The pines transmit a subdued green, — some pitch pines a livelier grass green, — deepest in the recesses, and a delicate buff (?) tinge is seen through the frosty veil of the willow. 

The birches, owing to the color of their trunks, are the most completely hoary. 

The elms, perhaps, are the most distinctly frosted, revealing their whole outlines like ghosts of trees, even a mile off, when seen against a dark hillside. 

The ground is encased in a thin black glaze (where it chances to be bare) and the iron rails and the telegraph wire. 

Insignificant weeds and stubble along the railroad causeway and elsewhere are now made very conspicuous, both by their increased size and bristling stiffness and their whiteness. 

Each wiry grass stem is become a stiff wand. The wind that begins to rise does not stir them you only hear a fine crackling sound when it blows hardest.

Behind each withered vegetable plant stands a stout ice plant, overlapping and concealing it. Stem answers to stem, and fruit to fruit. 

The heads of tansy are converted into confectionery somewhat like sugared almonds and regularly roughened (like orange-peel), and those of evening-primrose, and mullein, and hardhack, and lespedeza bear a still coarser kind. 

The wild carrot's bird's-nest umbel, now contracted above, is converted into almost a perfect hollow sphere, composed of contiguous thickened meridional ribs, which remind me of the fingers of a starfish (or five-finger). 

Each plant preserves its character, though exaggerated. 

Pigweed and Roman worm wood are ragged as ever on a larger scale, and the butterweed as stiffly upright. 

Tall goldenrod still more recurved. You naturally avoid running against the plant which you did not notice before. 

Standing on the south east side, I see the fine dark cores which the stems make. On the opposite side, only the pure white ice plant is seen. 

When I reach the woods I am surprised to find that the twigs, etc., are bristling with fine spicule, which stand on a thin glaze. I do not remember to have seen them previous winters. 

They are from one quarter to five eighths of an inch long by one twenty-fifth to one fiftieth of an inch wide at base and quite sharp, commonly on the storm side of the twig only and pointing in all directions horizontally and even vertically within an arc of 90°, but sometimes on opposite sides of the twig. 

They answer exactly to prickles or spines, especially to those of the locust. I observe them on the locust itself by chance, an icy spine at right angles on a vegetable one, making such a branch as is seen on some species. There are often ten or twelve within an inch along the twigs, but they are most like thorns when fewer. All the twigs and weeds and leaves, even the pine-needles, are armed with them. 

The pine-needles especially, beside their hoary glaze, are bristling with countless fine spiculae, which appear to point in almost all directions. 

It is also interesting to meet with them by accident on the edges of oak leaves, answering exactly to the vegetable spines there (though they are commonly at right angles with the plane of the leaf and often almost as thick as a comb), and on pine cones, suggesting that there should be something in that soil especially favorable to promote the growth of spines. 

As far as I observed, these spines were chiefly confined to the woods, — at least I had not noticed them on the causeway, — as if a fog might have collected in the former place but not in the last. They were, then, built in the mist, by a more delicate accretion. Thus it seems that not leaves only but other forms of vegetation are imitated by frost. 

Already the white pine plumes were drooping, but the pitch pines stood stiffly erect. I was again struck by the deep open cup at the extremity of the latter, formed by the needles standing out very regularly around the red-brown buds at the bottom. 

It is very warm, and by ten o'clock this ice is rapidly falling from the trees and covering the ground like hail; and before noon all that jewelry was dissolved. 

Rice tells me that there was a lark on his place in Sudbury about the 1st of January. 

One who has seen them tells me that a covey of thirteen quails daily visits Hayden's yard and barn, where he feeds them and can almost put his hands on them. Thermometer at noon 52°. 

Winckelmann says in his "History of Ancient Art," vol. i, page 95: "I am now past forty, and therefore at an age when one can no longer sport freely with life. I perceive, also, that a certain delicate spirit begins to evaporate, with which I raised myself, by powerful soarings, to the contemplation of the beautiful."

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 6, 1857

The glaze, the first we have had this year, but not a very good one. See December 24, 1854 ("A slight glaze, the first of the winter. This gives the woods a hoary aspect and increases the stillness");  December 26, 1855 ("We have this morning quite a glaze, there being at last an inch or two of crusted snow on the ground, the most we have had."); February 7, 1856 ("Begins to snow at 8 A.M.; turns to rain at noon, and clears off, or rather ceased raining, at night, with some glaze on the trees. "); February 8, 1856 ("But yesterday’s snow turning to rain, which froze as it fell, there is now a glaze on the trees, giving them a hoary look, icicles like rakes’ teeth on the rails, and a thin crust over all the snow.”)

One who has seen them tells me that a covey of thirteen quails daily visits Hayden's yard and barn, where he feeds them and can almost put his hands on them. See January 5, 1860 ("I see where the quails have run along the roadside, and can count the number of the bevy better than if I saw them."); January 10, 1854 ("The sportsmen chose the late thaw to go after quails . They come out at such times to pick the horse-dung in the roads, and can be traced thence to their haunts."); January 17, 1856 ("Henry Shattuck tells me that the quails come almost every day and get some saba beans within two or three rods of his house . . . Probably the deep snow drives them to it."); February 7, 1857 ("It seems in severe winters the quails venture out of the woods and join the poultry of the farmer's yard")

Winckelmann says . . . "I am now past forty, and therefore at an age when one can no longer sport freely with life. . . .”  See March 5, 1857 ((quoting Winckelmann) "my meditations commenced too late”). See also July 30 1852 ("After midsummer we have a belated feeling . . ., just as in middle age man anticipates the end of life"); January 9, 1853.("Perhaps, all that is best in our experience in middle life may be resolved into the memory of our youth ! ...If the genius visits me now I am not quite taken off my feet, but I remember how this experience is like, but less than, that I had long since."); August 18, 1853 ("What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now? — now is the season of fruits; but where is our fruit? The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life."); , August 23, 1853 (" Perhaps after middle age man ceases to be interested in the morning and in the spring.")

February  6. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 6

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, I love you like I love the sky

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 © 2009-2022