I begin to think that my wood will last.

February 18. 

P. M.  - To Yellow Birch Swamp. 

As I remember January, we had one (?) great thaw, succeeded by severe cold. It was harder getting about, though there may have been no more snow because it was light, and there was more continuous cold and clear sparkling weather.

But the last part of January and all February thus far have been alternate thaw and freeze and snow. It has more thaws, even as the running "r" occurs twice in it and but once in January. I do not know but the more light and warmth plainly accounts for the difference.

It does not take so much fuel to keep us warm of late. I begin to think that my wood will last. We begin to have days precursors of spring.

I see on ice by the riverside, front of N. Barrett's, very slender insects a third of an inch long, with gray-ish folded wings reaching far behind and two antennæ. Somewhat in general appearance like the long wasps.

At the old mill-site, saw two pigeon woodpeckers dart into and out of a white oak. Saw the yellow under sides of their wings. It is barely possible I am mistaken, but, since Wilson makes them common in Pennsylvania in winter,  I feel pretty sure. 

Such sights make me think there must be bare ground not far off south.

It is a little affecting to walk over the hills now, looking at the reindeer lichens here and there amid the snow, and remember that ere long we shall find violets also in their midst. What an odds the season makes!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 18, 1854

I begin to think that my wood will last. We begin to have days precursors of spring. See February 23, 1857 ("I have seen signs of the spring. "); see aksi A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring; I begin to think that my wood will last

Slender insects a third of an inch long, with gray-ish folded wings reaching far behind and two antennæ. SeeA Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Insects appear

two pigeon woodpeckers dart into and out of a white oak. 

 The Whether a rose - tinted water lily is sail- ing amid the pads , or Neighbor Hobson is getting out his ice with a cross - cut saw , while his oxen are eat- ing their stalks . I noticed that the ice which Garrison cut the other day contained the lily pads and stems within it . How different their environment now from when the queenly flower , floating on the trembling surface , exhaled its perfume amid a cloud of insects ! Hubbard's wooded hill is now almost bare of trees . Barberries still hang on the bushes , but all shrivelled . I found a bird's nest of grass and mud in a barberry bush filled full with them . It must have been done by . . . . .up and down on all sides of the tree, like parted hair blown aside by the wind, or as when a vest [sic] bursts and blows open. Rabbit-tracks numerous there, sonictimes quite a highway of tracks over and along the frozen and snow-covered brook. How pleasant the sound of water flowing with a, hollow sound under ice from which it has settled away, where great white; air bubbles or hollows, seen through the ice and dark water, alternately succeed each other. The Mitchella repens berries look very bright amid the still fresh green leaves . In the birch swamp west of this are many red (?) squirrel nests high in the birches . They are composed within of fibres of bark. I see where the squirrels have eaten walnuts along the wall and left the shells on the snow. Channing has some microscopic reading these clays . But he says in effect that these works are purely material . The idealist views things in the large. I read some of the speeches in Congress about the Nebraska Bill, -a thing the like of which I have not done for a year. What trifling upon a serious subject! while honest men are sawing wood for them outside . Your Congress halls have an ale-house odor, -a place for stale jokes and vulgar wit . It compels me to think of my fellow-creatures as apes and baboons. What a contrast between the upper and under side of many leaves, - the indurated and colored upper side and the tender, more or less colorless under side, - male and female, - even where they are almost sequally exposed! The under side is commonly white, however, as turned away from the light toward the earth. Many in which the contrast is finest are narrow, revolute leaves, like the delicate and beautiful tlndroineda Polif{)lia, the lecfum, ]ialmia glauca. De Quince says that "the ancients had no experimental knowledge of severe cliniates ." Neither have the English at home as compared \with us of New England, nor we, compared with the Esquirnaux. n.iy This is a common form of the birch scale, - black, I think, -- not white, at any rate. The handsome lanceolate leaves of the Andromeda Polifolia, dark. but pure and uniform dull red above, strongly revolute, and of a delicate bluish white beneath, deserve to be copied on to works of art .

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 ©  2009-2024