Tuesday. More wind and quite cold this morning, but very bright and sparkling, autumn-like air, reminding of frosts to be apprehended, also tempting abroad to adventure. The fall cricket — or is it alder locust? — sings the praises of the day.
So about 9 a. m. up river to Fair Haven Pond.
The flooded meadow, where the grasshoppers cling to the grass so thickly, is alive with swallows skimming just over the surface amid the grass-tops and apparently snapping up insects there. Are they catching the grasshoppers as they cling to bare poles? (I see the swallows equally thick there at 5 p. m. when I return also.)
River slowly falling. The most conspicuous weed rising above the water is the wool-grass, with its great, rich, seedy heads, which rise from a few inches to a foot above at present, as I push over the uncut meadows.
I see many white lilies fairly and freshly in bloom after all this flood, though it looks like a resurrection.
The wind is northwest, apparently by west, and I sail before it and under Hubbard's Bridge.
The red maples of Potter's Swamp show a dull-purple blush and sometimes a low scarlet bough, the effect evidently of the rain ripening them.
Rice told me about their crossing the causeway from Wayland to Sudbury some sixty years ago in a freshet which he could just remember, in a half-hogs head tub, used for scalding pigs, having nailed some boards on the bottom to keep it from upsetting. It was too deep for a team.
We begin to apprehend frosts before the melons are ripe!
A blue heron sails away from a pine at Holden Swamp shore and alights on the meadow above. Again he flies, and alights on the hard Conantum side, where at length I detect him standing far away stake-like (his body concealed), eying me and depending on his stronger vision.
The desmodium flowers are pure purple, rose-purple in the morning when quite fresh, excepting the two green spots. The D. rotundifolium also has the two green (or in its case greenish) spots on its very large flower. These desmodiums are so fine and inobvious that it is difficult to detect them. I go through a grove in vain, but when I get away, find my coat covered with their pods. They found me, though I did not them. The round-leafed desmodium has sometimes seven pods and large flowers still fresh.
The Lespedeza Stuvei is very abundant on Black berry Steep, two and a half to three feet high. It has a looser top and less dense spikes than the hirta. It gives a pink hue to the hillside. The L. violacea is smaller and much more violet, the hirta more white. Galium pilosum still common; and Desmodium acuminatum still by rock on Blackberry Steep. This to be added to the desmodiums of this place.
As I stand there, a young male goldfinch darts away with a twitter from a spear thistle top close to my side, and, alighting near, makes frequent returns as near to me and the thistle as it dares pass, not yet knowing man well enough to fear him.
I rest and take my lunch on Lee's Cliff, looking toward Baker Farm.
July 20, 2018
Methinks I hear the crow of a cock come up from its barn-yard. I think I hear the pine warbler's note in the woods behind me. Hear a plain phebe note from a chickadee.
Bluets still.
Epilobium down flies abundantly on hillsides.
I gather a bundle of pennyroyal; it grows largest and rankest high and close under these rocks, amid the loose stones. I tie my bundle with the purple bark of the poke-weed.
Sail across to Bee Tree Hill. This hillside, laid bare two years ago and partly last winter, is almost covered with the Aster macrophyllus, now in its prime. It grows large and rank, two feet high. On one I count seventeen central flowers withered, one hundred and thirty in bloom, and half as many buds.
As I looked down from the hilltop over the sprout-land, its rounded grayish tops amid the bushes I mistook for gray, lichen-clad rocks, such was its profusion and harmony with the scenery, like hoary rocky hilltops amid bushes. There were acres of it, densely planted. Also erechthites as abundant and rank in many places there as if it had been burnt over! So it does not necessarily imply fire. I thought I was looking down on gray, lichen-clad rocky summits on which a few bushes thinly grew. These rocks were asters, single ones a foot over, many prostrate, and making a gray impression.
Many leaves of shrubs are crisp and withered and fallen there, though as yet no drought nor frost. Nothing but rain can have done it. Aspen leaves are blackened. Stonecrop still. Another monster aphis on a huckleberry leaf. Galium triflorum still. See a great many young oaks and shrub oaks stripped by caterpillars of different kinds now.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal August 26, 1856
The fall cricket — or is it alder locust? — sings the praises of the day. See August 26, 1860 ("The shrilling of the alder locust is the solder that welds these autumn days together."); August 15, 1852 ("That clear ring like an alder locust (is it a cricket ?) for some time past is a sound which belongs to the season.)
A blue heron sails away from a pine at Holden Swamp shore and alights on the meadow above. See note to August 19, 1858 ("Blue herons, which have bred or been bred not far from us (plainly), are now at leisure, or are impelled to revisit our slow stream. I have not seen the last since spring. "); August 22, 1858 ("See one or two blue herons every day now, driving them far up or down the river before me."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Blue Heron
I gather a bundle of pennyroyal;. . . I tie my bundle with the purple bark of the poke-weed.See August 11, 1853 ("Evening draws on while I am gathering bundles of pennyroyal on the further Conantum height. I find it amid the stubble mixed with blue-curls and, as fast as I get my hand full, tie it into a fragrant bundle.”); August 13, 1852 ("Pennyroyal abundant in bloom. I find it springing from the soil lodged on large rocks in sprout-lands, and gather a little bundle, which scents my pocket for many days.")
Another monster aphis on a huckleberry leaf. See August 18, 1856 ("Saw yesterday and some days before a monster aphis some five eighths of an inch long on a huckleberry leaf.. . .")
A sympathy between the color of the weather-painted house and that of the lake and sky.The weather-painted house. This is the New England color. See April 3, 1858 ("In the hazy atmosphere yesterday we could hardly see Garfield's old unpainted farmhouse."); April 24, 1857 ("That is a very New England landscape. Buttrick's yellow farmhouse near by is in harmony with it.");June 15, 1859 (“A regular old-fashioned country house, long and low, one story unpainted, with a broad green field, half orchard, for all yard between it and the road, — a part of the hill side, — and much June-grass before it. This is where the men who save the country are born and bred.”)
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