A very warm and pleasant day -- a new season has arrived.

March 30

A very warm and pleasant day (at 2 P.M., 63° and rising).

The afternoon so warm -- wind southwest -- you take off coat. The streets are quite dusty for the first time.

The earth is more dry and genial, and you seem to be crossing the threshold between winter and summer.  

March 39, 2018

. . . The inhabitants come forth from their burrows such an after-noon as this, as the woodchuck and ground squirrels have, as the toads do. As I walk the street I realize that a new season has arrived.

It is time to begin to leave your greatcoat at home, to put on shoes instead of boots and feel lightfooted.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 30, 1860

It is time to begin to leave your greatcoat at home, to put on shoes instead of boots and feel light-footed. See . March 31, 1855 ("I am uncomfortably warm, gradually unbutton both my coats, and wish that I had left the outside one at home");  April 17, 1855 ("It is worth the while to walk so free and light, having got off both boots and greatcoat.”). Compare November 28, 1850 ("Within a day or two the walker finds gloves to be comfortable, and begins to think of an outside coat and of boots."); December 3, 1856 ("The man who has bought his boots feels like him who has got in his winter's wood.”); December 6, 1859 ("That is an era, when, in the beginning of the winter, you change from the shoes of summer to the boots of winter.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring; My Greatcoat on my Arm

March 30. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,   March 30

Crossing the threshold

between winter and summer –

shoes instead of boots.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  A new season has arrived.

 

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-600330