We eat our dinners on the middle of the line

December 7. 

Running the long northwest side of Richardson’s Fair Haven lot. 

It is a fair, sunny, and warm day in the woods for the season. We eat our dinners on the middle of the line, amid the young oaks in a sheltered and very unfrequented place. I cut some leafy shrub oaks and cast them down for a dry and springy seat. 

As I sit there amid the sweet-fern, talking with my man Briney, I observe that the recent shoots of the sweet-fern — which, like many larger bushes and trees, have a few leaves in a tuft still at their extremities – toward the sun are densely covered with a bright, warm, silvery down, which looks like frost, so thick and white. Looking the other way, I see none of it, but the bare reddish twigs. 

Even this is a cheering and compensating discovery in my otherwise barren work. I get thus a few positive values, answering to the bread and cheese which make my dinner. I owe thus to my weeks at surveying a few such slight but positive discoveries. 

Briney, who has been in this country but few years, says he has lost three children here. His eldest boy fell on the deck in rough weather and struck his knee on the anchor-chain, and though he did not mind it then, his whole body ran out of the wound within two or three months. 

I would rather sit at this table with the sweet-fern twigs between me and the sun than at the king’s.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 7, 1857


This  cheering and compensating discovery/the sweet-fern twigs between me and the sun. See November 17, 1858 ("Ascending a little knoll covered with sweet-fern, shortly after, the sun appearing but a point above the sweet-fern, its light was reflected from a dense mass of the bare downy twigs of this plant in a surprising manner which would not be believed if described. It was quite like the sunlight reflected from grass and weeds covered with hoar frost. Yet in an ordinary light these are but dark or dusky looking twigs with scarcely a noticeable downiness. Yet as I saw it, there was a perfect halo of light resting on the knoll as I moved to right or left.”); January 14, 1860 ("It has a wild and jagged leaf, alte  January 17, 1858 ("rnately serrated. A warm reddish color revealed by the snow. "); I see a large downy owl's feather adhering to a sweet-fern twig, looking like the down of a plant blowing in the wind."); Compare April 19 1852 ("How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact! suggesting what worlds remain to be unveiled. That phenomenon of the andromeda seen against the sun cheers me exceedingly . . . It is a natural magic. These little leaves are the stained windows in the cathedral of my world.”)  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Sweet-Fern

A white weasel

December 6. 

Sunday. 

Flannery tells me he is cutting in Holbrook's Swamp, in the Great Meadows, a lonely place. He sees a fox repeatedly there, and also a white weasel,--once with a mouse in its mouth, in the swamp.

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

A white weasel. See February 22, 1855 ("Farmer showed me an ermine weasel he caught in a trap three or four weeks ago. . . .All white but the tip of the tail"); February 21, 1855 ("How plain, wholesome, and earthy are the colors of quadrupeds generally! . . . The white of the polar bear, ermine weasel, etc., answers to the snow; . . .There are few or no bluish animals. ")

A few flakes

December 5. 

At noon a few flakes fall.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 5, 1857

See  December 16, 1857 ("Begins to snow about 8 A. M., and in fifteen minutes the ground is white, but it soon stops."); December 26, 1857 ("Snows all day, — first snow of any consequence, three or four inches in all.")/ See also  November 20, 1857 ("I see a few flakes of snow, two or three only, like flocks of gossamer, straggling in a slanting direction to the ground, unnoticed by most, in a rather raw air.");  December 9, 1855 ("At 8.30 a fine snow begins to fall, increasing very gradually, perfectly straight down, till in fifteen minutes the ground is white . . . But in a few minutes it turns to rain, and so the wintry landscape is postponed for the present.”); and  note to November 29, 1856 ("This is the first snow.")

I survey to a white oak called in ’91 “a small white oak.”

December 4. 

Surveying the Richardson Fair Haven lot. 

December 4, 2017

Rufus Morse, who comes to find his bounds on R., accounts for his deed being tattered by saying that some tame flying squirrels got loose and into a chest where he kept his papers and nibbled them, though the lid was not raised enough to get in a cent! They are so flat. 

I survey to a white oak called in ’91 “a small white oak.”

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 4, 1857

December 4. SeeA Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, December 4; 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

I turn the porch light on. It is dark when I leave. The car is covered with frost. It’s 24°. Driving down the road there is fog. Everything is covered with frost. It is imperceptible when I begin to see the road from the light of the dawn. And now the mountains edged in pink against what is going to be clear blue sky. Turning the corner in East Middlebury a full moon in the northwest horizon. Frosty fields, shapely maples against the sky. The sun far to the south now appearing and disappearing behind the mountain.The rising sun casts long shadows over the whitened field. I breathe the frosty air.

 December 4, 2017

Under a rock near the pond.

December 3

Thursday. 

Surveying the Richardson lot, which bounds on Walden Pond, I turned up a rock near the pond to make a bound with, and found under it, attached to it, a collection of black ants (say a quarter of an inch long) an inch in diameter, collected around one monster black ant as big as four or five at least, and a small parcel of yellowish eggs (?). The large ant had no wings and was probably their queen. The ants were quite lively, though but little way under the edge of the rock. The eggs (?) adhered to the rock when turned up.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 3, 1857

I turned up a rock near the pond to make a bound with. See May 19, 1857 (“Digging again to find a stake in woods, came across a nest or colony of wood ants, yellowish or sand-color, a third of an inch long, with their white grubs, now squirming, still larger, and emitting that same pungent spicy odor.”)

I turned up a rock. 

The large black ant had no wings – 

probably their queen.

Measuring Little Goose Pond

December 2. 

December 2, 2017

Measuring Little Goose Pond, I observed two painted tortoises moving about under the thin transparent ice. When I broke it with my fist over each in succession, it was stunned by the blow. I put them back through the hole; else they might have frozen outside. There was a brown leech spread broad and flat and roundish on the sternum of one, nearly an inch and a half across, apparently going to winter with it. 

Where are the respectabilities of sixty years ago, the village aristocracy, the Duncan Ingrahams who lived in the high house? An Englishman lived in the Vose house. How poor and short-lived a distinction to strive after! 

I find that, according to the deed of Duncan Ingraham to John Richardson in 1797, my old bean-field on Walden Pond then belonged to George Minott. (Minott thinks he bought it of an Allen.) This was Deacon George Minott, who lived in the house next below the East Quarter schoolhouse, and was a brother of my grandfather-in-law. He was directly descended from Thomas Minott, who, according to Shattuck, was secretary of the Abbot of Walden (!) in Essex, and whose son George was born at Saffron Walden (!) and afterwards was one of the early settlers of Dorchester. 

Roads were once described as leading to a meeting house, but not so often nowadays.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 2, 1857

Measuring Little Goose Pond, I observed two painted tortoises moving about under the thin transparent ice. See December 13, 1857 ("This and the like ponds are just covered with virgin ice just thick enough to bear,. . . I see those same two tortoises (of Dec. 2d), moving about in the same place under the ice, which I can not crack with my feet.”); December 4, 1853 ("Goose Pond apparently froze over last night, all but a few rods, but not thick enough to bear. I see a lizard on the bottom under the ice.“) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Painted Turtle (Emys picta)

I hear the faintest possible quivet from a nuthatch, quite near me.

December 1 

P. M. —Walking in Ebby Hubbard's woods, I hear a red squirrel barking at me amid the pine and oak tops, and now I see him coursing from tree to tree. How securely he travels there, fifty feet from the ground, leaping from the slender, bending twig of one tree across an interval of three or four feet and catching at the nearest twig of the next, which so bends under him that it is at first hard to get up it. His travelling a succession of leaps in the air at that height without wings! And yet he gets along about as rapidly as on the ground. 

I hear the faintest possible quivet from a nuthatch, quite near me on a pine. I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter, as if it did not breed here, but wintered here.* 

I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 1, 1857

*[Hear it all the fall (and occasionally through the summer of ’59).]

And now I see him coursing from tree to tree.  See October 26, 1855 (" I see a red squirrel dash out from the wall, snatch an apple from amid many on the ground, and, running swiftly up the tree with it, proceed to eat it, sitting on a smooth dead limb, with its back to the wind and its tail curled close over its back"); December 16, 1855 ("See two red squirrels. . . One sits twirling apparently a dried apple in his paws, with his tail curled close over his back as if to keep it warm, fitting its curve. How much smothered sunlight in their wholesome brown red this misty day! It is clear New England, Nov-anglia, like the red subsoil.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Red Squirrel. Compare May 7, 1855 ("Scare up two gray squirrels in the Holden wood, which run glibly up the tallest trees on the opposite side to me, and leap across from the extremity of the branches to the next trees, and so on very fast ahead of me.")

I thus always begin to hear this bird on the approach of winter. See December 31, 1853 ("Heard and saw together white-bellied nuthatches and chickadees, the former uttering a faint quank quank and making a loud tapping."); December 5, 1856 ("A pair of nuthatches flit by toward a walnut, flying low in mid- course and then ascending to the tree. I hear one's faint tut tut or gnah gnah — no doubt heard a good way by its mate now flown into the next tree . . . It is a chubby bird, white, slate-color, and black."); November 26, 1860 ("I hear the faint note of a nuthatch like the creak of a limb. I detect it on the trunk of an oak much nearer than I suspected, and its mate or companion not far off. This is a phenomenon of the late fall or early winter; for we do not hear them in summer that I remember."); July 12, 1860 ("Hear a nuthatch in the street. So they breed here."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Nuthatch

I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day. See note to November 30, 1857 ("The air is full of geese . . . According to my calculation a thousand or fifteen hundred may have gone over Concord to-day.”) See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Geese in Autumn

December 1. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, December 1

I hear the faintest

quivet from a nuthatch – quite

near me on a pine.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  A nuthatch, quite near me.

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-571201