We eat our dinners on the middle of the line

December 7. 

Running the long northwest side of Richardson’s Fair Haven lot. 

It is a fair, sunny, and warm day in the woods for the season. We eat our dinners on the middle of the line, amid the young oaks in a sheltered and very unfrequented place. I cut some leafy shrub oaks and cast them down for a dry and springy seat. 

As I sit there amid the sweet-fern, talking with my man Briney, I observe that the recent shoots of the sweet-fern — which, like many larger bushes and trees, have a few leaves in a tuft still at their extremities – toward the sun are densely covered with a bright, warm, silvery down, which looks like frost, so thick and white. Looking the other way, I see none of it, but the bare reddish twigs. 

Even this is a cheering and compensating discovery in my otherwise barren work. I get thus a few positive values, answering to the bread and cheese which make my dinner. I owe thus to my weeks at surveying a few such slight but positive discoveries. 

Briney, who has been in this country but few years, says he has lost three children here. His eldest boy fell on the deck in rough weather and struck his knee on the anchor-chain, and though he did not mind it then, his whole body ran out of the wound within two or three months. 

I would rather sit at this table with the sweet-fern twigs between me and the sun than at the king’s.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 7, 1857


This  cheering and compensating discovery/the sweet-fern twigs between me and the sun. See November 17, 1858 ("Ascending a little knoll covered with sweet-fern, shortly after, the sun appearing but a point above the sweet-fern, its light was reflected from a dense mass of the bare downy twigs of this plant in a surprising manner which would not be believed if described. It was quite like the sunlight reflected from grass and weeds covered with hoar frost. Yet in an ordinary light these are but dark or dusky looking twigs with scarcely a noticeable downiness. Yet as I saw it, there was a perfect halo of light resting on the knoll as I moved to right or left.”) Also see April 19 1852 ("How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact! suggesting what worlds remain to be unveiled. That phenomenon of the andromeda seen against the sun cheers me exceedingly. .... It is a natural magic. These little leaves are the stained windows in the cathedral of my world.”)