A Book of the Seasons: March 5.

March 5.

Studying lichens –
inspecting the bark of trees.
I see nothing else.
March 5, 1852

Myriad buds seen
expanded against the sky –
the sap is flowing.
March 5, 1852

"And for the first time
I see the water looking
blue on the meadows."
March 5, 1854

Blue haze. Strong warm wind
rustling leaves on the hillsides.
A new season comes.

March 5 1855

This herald of spring

commonly unseen – it sits 

so close to the bark.

March 5, 1859

March 5, 2020

It is a clear morning with some wind beginning to rise, 

and for the first time 

I see the water looking 

blue on the meadows. 

March 5, 1854

A strong but warm southwesterly wind has produced a remarkable haze. As I go along by Sleepy Hollow, this strong, warm wind, rustling the leaves on the hillsides, this blue haze, and the russet earth seen through it, remind me that a new season has come. March 5, 1855

Going down-town this forenoon, I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it. March 5, 1859

It was the handle by which my thoughts took firmly hold on spring. This herald of spring is commonly unseen, it sits so close to the bark. March 5, 1859

I find myself inspecting little granules, as it were, on the bark of trees, little shields or apothecia springing from a thallus. Such is the mood of my mind, and I call it studying lichens. The habit of looking at things microscopically, as the lichens on the trees and rocks, really prevents my seeing aught else in a walk. March 5, 1852

To the lichenist is not the shield (or rather the apothecium) of a lichen disproportionately large compared with the universe? The minute apothecium of the pertusaria, which the woodchopper never detected, occupies so large a space in my eye at present as to shut out a great part of the world. Surely I might take wider views. March 5, 1852

As I sit under their boughs, looking into the sky, I suddenly see the myriad black dots of the expanded buds against the sky. Their sap is flowing. March 5, 1852

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 © 2009-2016