A picture of winter.

January 5

To-day the trees are white with snow – I mean their stems and branches – and have the true wintry look, on the storm side. 

Not till this has the winter come to the forest.

They look like the small frostwork in the path and on the windows now, especially the oak woods at a distance, and you see better the form which their branches take. 

That is a picture of winter, and now you may put a cottage under them and roof it with snow-drifts, and let the smoke curl up amid the boughs in the morning.

It was a dark day, the heavens shut out with dense snow-clouds and the trees wetting me with the melting snow, when I went through Brown's wood on Fair Haven, which they are cutting off, and suddenly looking through the woods between the stems of the trees, I thought I saw an extensive fire in the western horizon. 

January 5, 2020

It was a bright coppery-yellow fair-weather cloud along the edge of the horizon, gold with some alloy of copper, in such contrast with the remaining clouds as to suggest nothing less than fire. On that side the clouds which covered our day, low in the horizon with a dun and smoke-like edge, were rolled up like a curtain with heavy folds, revealing this further bright curtain beyond. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 5, 1852

Trees . . .have the true wintry look, on the storm side. See December 23, 1851 (“There is a narrow ridge of snow, a white line, on the storm side of the stem of every exposed tree.”); December 26, 1855 (“The ice is chiefly on the upper and on the storm side of twigs”); January 14, 1856 ("You can best tell from what side the storm came by observing on which side of the trees the snow is plastered.")

Trees stems and branches

white with snow on the storm side –

the true wintry look.

Put a cottage there

roof it with snow-drifts and

let the smoke curl up.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, A picture of winter.

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

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