The season when you sit under a bridge and watch the dimples made by the rain.

March 20 . 

Worm-piles in dooryard this morning. 

A foggy morning; turns to some April-like rain, after east wind of yesterday. 

A. Buttrick says he saw and heard woodcocks the 5th of March this year, or much earlier than ever before. Thinks they are now laying. His dog put them up at the brushy point below Flint's,– one pair there. Is an other pair at Hunt’s Pond, another at Eleazer Davis's Hill. 

He says that he caught three skunks and a crow last week in his traps baited with muskrat for mink. Says a fox will kill a skunk and eat him greedily before he smells, but nothing will eat a mink. 

2 P.M. — Thermometer about 49. 

This is a slight, dripping, truly April-like rain. You hardly know whether to open your umbrella or not. More mist than rain; no wind, and the water perfectly smooth and dark, but ever and anon the cloud or mist thickens and darkens on one side, and there is a sudden rush of warm rain, which will start the grass. 

I stand on Hunt's Bridge and, looking up- stream, see now first, in this April rain, the water being only rippled by the current, those alternate dark and light patches on the surface, all alike dimpled with the falling drops. (The ground now soaks up the rain as it falls, the frost being pretty commonly out.) It reminds me of the season when you sit under a bridge and watch the dimples made by the rain. 

I see where some one has lately killed a striped snake. 

The white maple by the bridge is abundantly out, and of course did not open this rainy day. Yesterday, at least, it began.

I observed on the 18th a swarm of those larger tipulidæ, or fuzzy gnats , dancing in a warm sprout-land, about three feet above a very large white pine stump which had been sawed off quite smoothly and was conspicuous. They kept up their dance directly over this, only swaying to and fro slightly, but always recovering their position over it. 

This afternoon, in the sprinkling rain, I see a very small swarm of the same kind dancing in like manner in a garden, only a foot above the ground but directly over a bright tin dish,— apparently a mustard-box, — and I suspect that they select some such conspicuous fixed point on the ground over which to hover and by which to keep their place, finding it for their convenience to keep the same place. These gyrate in the air as water-bugs on the water.  [ For same , March 10 , 1859]

Methinks this gentle rainy day reminds me more of summer than the warmest fair day would. 

A. Buttrick said to-day that the black ducks come when the grass begins to grow in the meadows, i.e. in the water. 

Perhaps calm weather and thermometer at about 50, the frost being commonly out and ground bare, may be called an April-like rain. The 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th were very pleasant and warm days, the thermometer standing at 50°  55° , 56° , 56°, and 51° (average 53 1/2°), - quite a spell of warm weather (succeeding to cold and blustering), in which the alders and white maples, as well as many more skunk-cabbages, bloomed, and the hazel catkins became relaxed and elongated. 

A. Buttrick says he has seen ground squirrels some time. 

I hear that the first alewives have been caught in the Acushnet River.

Our own mistakes often reveal to us the true colors of objects better than a conscious discrimination. Coming up the street the other afternoon, I thought at first that I saw a smoke in Mr. Cheney's garden. It was his white tool-house.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 20, 1860

Worm-piles in dooryard this morning. See April 9, 1861 ("Worm-piles in grass."); April 14, 1859 (“There are many worm holes or piles in the door-yard this forenoon. How long?”); April 26, 1856 (“Worm-piles about the door-step this morning; how long?”)

You hardly know whether to open your umbrella or not. March 21, 1858 ("This first spring rain is very agreeable. I love to hear the pattering of the drops on my umbrella, and I love also the wet scent of the umbrella. ")

The season when you sit under a bridge and watch the dimples made by the rain. See March 21, 1858 ("Standing by that pool, it is pleasant to see the dimples made on its smooth surface by the big drops, after the rain has held up a quarter of an hour."); July 31, 1860 ("The differently shaded or lit currents of the river through it all; but anon it begins to rain very hard, and a myriad white globules dance or rebound an inch or two from the surface, where the big drops fall, and I hear a sound as if it rains pebbles or shot.")

These gyrate in the air as water-bugs on the water. See March 19, 1858 ("They keep up a circulation in the air like water-bugs on the water.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Fuzzy Gnats (tipulidæ)