Floating meadows explained,pine needles examined

March 11.

P. M. — To Annursnack. Clear and rather pleasant; the ground again bare; wind northerly. 

I am surprised to see how rapidly that ice that covered the meadows on the 1st of March has disappeared under the influence of the sun alone. The greater part of what then lay on the meadows a foot thick has melted—two thirds at least. 

On Abel Hosmer’s pasture, just southeast of the stone bridge, I see where the sod was lifted up over a great space in the flood of the 17th of February. I see one piece of crust, twelve feet by six, turned completely topsy turvy with its ice beneath it. This has prevented the ice from melting, and on examining it I find that the ice did not settle down on to the grass after the water went down and then freeze to it, for the blades of grass penetrate one inch into the ice, showing that, the water being shallow, the whole froze, and the grass was frozen in, and thus, when the water rose again, was lifted up. 

A bluebird day before yesterday in Stow.

Many of those dirty-white millers or ephemera in the air.

As I sit at the base of Annursnack the earth appears almost completely bare, but from the top I see considerable white ice here and there. What is left is only the whitened and rotting ice, which, being confined to the lowest hollows and meadows, is only observed from a height. 

At this season, — before grass springs to conceal them, — I notice those pretty little roundish shells on the tops of hills; one to-day on Annursnack. 

I see pitch pine needles looking as if whitewashed, thickly covered on each of the two slopes of the needle with narrow, white, oyster-shell-like latebra or chrysalids of an insect.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 11, 1855

Many of those dirty-white millers or ephemera in the air. See March 3, 1855 (“I see a dirty-white miller fluttering about over the winter-rye patch next to Hubbard’s Grove. ”)