Late Blackberries

August 27.

A little more rain last night.

What were those insects, some winged, with short backs and say half an inch long, others wingless and shorter, like little coils of brass wire (so marked), in dense droves together on trees and fences, — apparently harmless, — especially a week or ten days ago ?

I was telling Jonas Potter of my lameness yesterday, whereat he says that he "broke" both his feet when he was young, — I imagined how they looked through his wrinkled cowhides, — and he did not get over it for four years, nay, even now he sometimes felt pains in them before a storm.

All our life, i.e. the living part of it, is a persistent dreaming awake. The boy does not camp in his father's yard. That would not be adventurous enough, there are too many sights and sounds to disturb the illusion; so he marches off twenty or thirty miles and there pitches his tent, where stranger inhabitants are tamely sleeping in their beds just like his father at home, and camps in their yard, perchance. But then he dreams uninterruptedly that he is anywhere but where he is.

I often see yarrow with a delicate pink tint, very distinct from the common pure-white ones.

What is often called poverty, but which is a simpler and truer relation to nature, gives a peculiar relish to life, just as to be kept short gives us an appetite for food.

Vilfa vaginaflora (?) well out.

The first notice I have that grapes are ripening is by the rich scent at evening from my own native vine against the house, when I go to the pump, though I thought there were none on it.

The children have done bringing huckleberries to sell for nearly a week. They are suspected to have berries [sic] in them.

On the 23d I gathered perfectly fresh and large low black-berries, peculiarly sweet and soft, in the shade of the pines at Thrush Alley, long after they are done in open fields. They seem like a different variety from the common, they are so much sweeter, tenderer, and larger. They do not grow densely but sparingly, now resting on the ground in the shade of their leaves, perfectly ripe. These that have ripened slowly and perfectly in the shade are the sweetest and tenderest, have the least of the bramble berry about them.

Elder-berry clusters swell and become heavy and therefore droop, bending the bushes down, just in proportion as they ripen. Hence you see the green cymes perfectly erect, the half-ripe drooping, and the perfectly ripe hanging straight down on the same bush.

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 greenness, 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 couldn'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' standard, that at any rate he could not raise children in the way they should go. I once saw one of his boys astride of my earliest watermelon, which grew near a broken paling, and brandishing a case-knife over it, but I instantly blowed him off with my voice from a neighboring window before serious damage was done, and made such an ado about [it] as convinced him that he was not in his father's dominions, at any rate. This melon, though it lost some of its bloom then, grew to be a remarkably large and sweet one, though it bore to the last a triangular scar of the tap which the thief had designed on it.

I served my apprenticeship and have since done considerable journey-work in the huckleberry-field, though I never paid for my schooling and clothing in that way. It was itself some of the best schooling I got, and paid for itself. Occasionally in still summer forenoons, when perhaps a mantua-maker was to be dined, and a huckleberry pudding had been decided on, I, a lad of ten, was dispatched to the huckleberry hills, all alone. My scholastic education could be thus far tampered with and an excuse might be found. No matter how few and scarce the berries on the near hills, the exact number necessary for a huckleberry pudding could surely be collected by 11 o'clock. My rule in such cases was never to eat one till my dish was full.

At other times when I had companions, some used to bring such curiously shaped dishes that I was often curious to see how the berries disposed of themselves in them. Some brought a coffee-pot to the huckleberry- field, and such a vessel possessed this advantage at least, that if a greedy boy had skimmed off a handful or two on his way home, he had only to close the lid and give his vessel a shake to have it full again. This was done all round when we got as far homeward as the Dutch house. This can probably be done with any vessel that has much side to it.

I once met with a whole family — father and mother and children — ravaging a huckleberry-field in this wise: they cut up the bushes, and, as they went, beat them over the edge of a bushel basket, till they had it full of berries, ripe and green, leaves, sticks, etc., and so they passed along out of my sight like wild men.

See Veratrum viride completely withered and brown from top to bottom, probably as early as skunk-cabbage.

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")


On the 23d I gathered perfectly fresh and large low black-berries. . . long after they are done in open fields. . . . 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 23, 1856 ("Now for high blackberries, though the low are gone.” ;August 28, 1856 (“low blackberries done, high blackberries still to be had.”);  See also August 10, 1853 ("August, royal and rich . . .It is glorious to see those great shining high blackberries, now partly ripe . . ."); August 17, 1853 ("The high blackberries are now in their prime; the richest berry we have.”); August 22, 1852 ("Is not the high blackberry our finest berry?");); August 27, 1857 ("Detected a, to me, new kind of high blackberry on the edge of the cliff beyond Conant's wall on Lee's ground,"); ; August 31, 1857 ("An abundance of fine high blackberries behind Britton's old camp on the Lincoln road, now in their prime there, which have been overlooked. Is it not our richest fruit?")

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."