The water is now tepid in the morning to the hands, as I slip my hands down the paddle.
Hear the wood pewee, the warm weather sound.
I sail up the stream, but the wind is hardly powerful enough to overcome the current, and sometimes I am almost at a standstill where the stream is most contracted and swiftest, and there I sit carelessly waiting for the struggle between wind and current to decide itself.
There is a surprising change since I last passed up the Assabet; the fields are now clothed with so dark and rich a green, and the wooded shore is all lit up with the tender, bright green of birches fluttering in the wind and shining in the light, and red maple keys are seen at a distance against the tender green of birches and other trees.
The birches burst out suddenly into leaf and make a great show. It is the first to clothe large tracts of deciduous woodlands with green, and perchance it marks an epoch in the season, the transition decidedly and generally from bare twigs to leaves. When the birches have put on their green sacks, then a new season has come. The light reflected from their tender yellowish green is like sunlight.
A rill empties in above the stone-heaps, and I see where it ran out of June-berry Meadow, and I am impressed as it were by the intelligence of the brook, which for ages in the wildest regions, before science is born, knows so well the level of the ground and through whatever woods or other obstacles finds its way.
Hear the wood pewee, the warm weather sound. See May 17, 1853 ("I hear the wood pewee, — pe-a-wai. The heat of yesterday has brought him on. "); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Arrival of the Eastern Wood Pewee
I sail up the stream, but the wind is hardly powerful enough to overcome the current, and sometimes I am almost at a standstill where the stream is most contracted and swiftest, and there I sit carelessly waiting for the struggle between wind and current to decide itself.
It is a pleasing delay, to be referred to the elements, and meanwhile I survey the shrubs on shore.
The large green keys of the white maples are now conspicuous, looking like the wings of insects.
The large green keys of the white maples are now conspicuous, looking like the wings of insects.
Azalea nudiflora in woods begins to leaf now.
May 17, 2016
The birches burst out suddenly into leaf and make a great show. It is the first to clothe large tracts of deciduous woodlands with green, and perchance it marks an epoch in the season, the transition decidedly and generally from bare twigs to leaves. When the birches have put on their green sacks, then a new season has come. The light reflected from their tender yellowish green is like sunlight.
A rill empties in above the stone-heaps, and I see where it ran out of June-berry Meadow, and I am impressed as it were by the intelligence of the brook, which for ages in the wildest regions, before science is born, knows so well the level of the ground and through whatever woods or other obstacles finds its way.
Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship round the globe?
Hear the wood pewee, the warm weather sound. See May 17, 1853 ("I hear the wood pewee, — pe-a-wai. The heat of yesterday has brought him on. "); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Arrival of the Eastern Wood Pewee
Azalea nudiflora in woods begins to leaf now. See note to May 31, 1853 ("We went on down the brook, – Melvin and I and his dog, – and crossed the river in his boat, and he conducted me to where the Azalea nudiflora grew,")
The wooded shore is
all lit up with the tender
bright green of birches
fluttering in the wind and
shining in the light.
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
tinyurl.com/hdt-540517
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