A warm reddish color revealed by the snow / blueness of the air.

January 14

About an inch more snow fell this morning. An average snow-storm is from six to eight inches deep on a level. 

The snow having ceased falling this forenoon, I go to Holden Wood, Conantum, to look for tracks. It is too soon. I see none at all but those of a hound, and also where a partridge waded through the light snow, apparently while it was falling, making a deep gutter. 

Yesterday there was a broad field of bare ice on each side of the river, i. e. on the meadows, and now, though it is covered with snow an inch deep, as I stand on the river or even on Fair Haven Hill a quarter to half a mile off, I can see where the ice is through the snow, plainly, trace its whole outline, it being quite dark compared with where the snow has fallen on snow. In this case a mantle of light snow even an inch thick is not sufficient to conceal the darkness of the ice beneath it, where it is contrasted with snow on snow. 

Those little groves of sweet-fern still thickly leaved, whose tops now rise above the snow, are an interesting warm brown-red now, like the reddest oak leaves. Even this is an agreeable sight to the walker over snowy fields and hillsides. It has a wild and jagged leaf, alternately serrated. A warm reddish color revealed by the snow.

It is a mild day, and I notice, what I have not observed for some time, that blueness of the air only to be perceived in a mild day. I see it between me and woods half a mile distant. The softening of the air amounts to this. The mountains are quite invisible. You come forth to see this great blue presence lurking about the woods and the horizon.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 14, 1860

Too soon to look for tracks. See January 14, 1853 ("It is now pure and trackless. Walking three or four miles in the woods, I see but one track of any kind, yet by to-morrow morning there will he countless tracks of all sizes all over the country.")

I see where a partridge waded through the light snow, apparently while it was falling, making a deep gutter.  See January 26, 1855 ("This morning it snows again. . .I see where a partridge has waddled through the snow still falling, making a continuous track. I look in the direction to which it points, and see the bird just skimming over the bushes fifteen rods off.")

A warm reddish color revealed by the snow. See November 14, 1858 ("Now I begin to notice the silver downy twigs of the sweet-fern in the sun (lately bare). "); 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"); November 26, 1858 ("A good many leaves of the sweet-fern, though withered now, still hold on; so that this shrub may be put with the oaks in this respect. So far as I remember, it is peculiar among shrubs in this.");December 7, 1857 ("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 . . .I would rather sit at this table with the sweet-fern twigs between me and the sun than at the king’s."); January 19, 1859 ("The sweet-fern retains its serrate terminal leaves.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Sweet-Fern

January 14. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  January 14

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/hdt18600114