The year is but a succession of days,
and I see that I could assign some office to each day
which, summed up, would be the history of the year.
Henry Thoreau, August 24, 1852
Mowers and rakers
bending to their manly work
with graceful motion.
August 5, 2013
August 5, 2016
It is one long acclivity from winter to midsummer and another long declivity from midsummer to winter. August 5, 1854
I go out before sunrise to gather blueberries; the-fresh, dewy almost crispy blueberries, much cooler and more grateful at this hour. The whole mountain-top for two miles is covered, on countless little shelves and in hollows between the rocks, with low blueberries, just in their prime. Blueberries of every degree of blueness and of bloom. August 5, 1860
When we behold this summit at this season of the year, far away and blue in the horizon, we may think of the blueberries as blending their color with the general blueness of the mountain. August 5, 1860
When we behold this summit at this season of the year, far away and blue in the horizon, we may think of the blueberries as blending their color with the general blueness of the mountain. August 5, 1860
Though yesterday was rainy, the air to-day is filled with a blue haze. August 5, 1854
This forenoon there were no hayers in the meadow, but before we returned we saw many at work. August 5, 1858
We are now in the midst of the meadow-haying season, and almost every meadow or section of a meadow has its band of half a dozen mowers and rakers, either bending to their manly work with regular and graceful motion or resting in the shade, while the boys are turning the grass to the sun. I passed as many as sixty or a hundred men thus at work to-day. August 5, 1854
On river. Mikania a day or two. August 5, 1856
See the mikania only in one or two places beginning, August 5, 1858
The river's brim is in perfection, after the mikania is in bloom and before the pontederia and pads and the willows are too much imbrowned, and the meadows all shorn. August 5, 1854
See the mikania only in one or two places beginning, August 5, 1858
The river's brim is in perfection, after the mikania is in bloom and before the pontederia and pads and the willows are too much imbrowned, and the meadows all shorn. August 5, 1854
The foliage is apparently now in the height of its beauty, this wet year, now dense enough to hide the trunks and stems. The black willows are perhaps in their best condition, —airy, rounded masses of light green rising one above another . . . like long green clouds or wreaths of vapor resting on the riverside August 5, 1858
These willows appear to grow best on elevated sand-bars or deep sandy banks, which the stream has brought down, leaving a little meadow behind them, at some bend, often mixed with sawdust from a mill. They root themselves firmly here, and spread entirely over the sand. August 5, 1858
[Willows] resound still with the sprightly twitter of the kingbird, that aerial and spirited bird hovering over them, swallow-like, which loves best, methinks, to fly where the sky is reflected beneath him. The kingbird, by his activity and lively note and his white breast, keeps the air sweet. He sits now on a dead willow twig, akin to the flecks of mackerel sky, or its reflection in the water, or the white clamshell, wrong side out, opened by a musquash, or the fine particles of white quartz that may be found in the muddy river’s sand. He is here to give a voice to all these. August 5, 1858
Also now from time to time you hear the chattering of young blackbirds or the link of bobolinks there, or see the great bittem flap slowly away. August 5, 1858
Near Lee's (returning), see a large bittern, pursued by small birds, alight on the shorn meadow near the pickerel-weeds, but, though I row to the spot, he effectually conceals himself. August 5, 1854
Paddling back at 6 A. M., saw, nearly half a mile off, a blue heron standing erect on the topmost twig of the great buttonwood on the street in front of Mr. Prichard’s house, while perhaps all within were abed and asleep. Little did they think of it, and how they were presided over. August 5, 1855
The sium has begun to lift its umbels of white flowers above most other plants. August 5, 1858
I cannot sufficiently admire the rhexia, one of the highest-colored purple flowers, but difficult to bring home in its perfection. August 5, 1852
I see very few whorled or common utricularias, but the purple ones are exceedingly abundant on both sides the river, apparently from one end to the other. . . . Their color is peculiarly high for a water plant. August 5, 1854
The purple utricularia tinges the pools in many places, the most common of all its tribe. August 5, 1858
The purple utricularia is the flower of the river to-day, apparently in its prime. . . . I can distinguish their color thus far. The buds are the darkest or deepest purple. Methinks it is more abundant than usual this year. August 5, 1858
Now, at 4 p. m. this dog-day, cloudy weather, the Hypericum mutilum is abundantly open in the Solidago lanceolata path, sometimes fifteen inches high, while the Canadense and angulatum are shut. August 5, 1856
At the Assabet stone bridge . . . apparently the Apocynum cannabinum var. hypericifolium (?). The tallest is four feet high. The flowers very small (hardly more than an eighth of an inch in diameter), the segments of the corolla not revolute but nearly erect. There are twenty to thirty flowers at end of a branch. August 5, 1856
That is a glorious swamp of Miles's. . . the wildest and richest gardens that we have. August 5, 1852
The men, women, and children who perchance come hither blueberrying in their season get more than the value of the berries in the influences of the scene. August 5, 1852
How wildly rich and beautiful hang on high there the blueberries which might so easily be poisonous, the cool blue clusters high in air. Choke-berries, fair to the eye but scarcely palatable, hang far above your head, weighing down the bushes. August 5, 1858
The wild holly berry, perhaps the most beautiful of berries, hanging by slender threads from its more light and open bushes and more delicate leaves. The bushes, eight feet high, are black with choke-berries. August 5, 1852
They are scarcely edible, but their beauty atones for it. See those handsome racemes of ten or twelve cherries each, dark glossy red, semi- transparent. You love them not the less because they are not quite palatable August 5, 1856
I now find an abundance of the clustered rubus ripe. It is not large and has a clammy, subacid taste, but some are very sweet. Clusters generally drooping. August 5, 1856
To my surprise found on the dinner-table at Thatcher's the Vaccinium Oxycoccus. August 5, 1857
The light from the western sky is stronger still than that of the moon, and when I hold up my hand, the west side is lighted while the side toward the moon is comparatively dark. August 5, 1851
Now many swallows in the twilight, after circling eight feet high, come back two or three hundred feet high and then go down the river. August 5, 1855
The swallows go over with a watery twittering. I hear the whip-poor-will at a distance. It is almost dark. I distinguish the modest moonlight on my paper. August 5. 1851
As the twilight deepens and the moonlight is more and more bright, I begin to distinguish myself, who I am and where; as my walls contract, I become more collected and composed, and sensible of my own existence, as when a lamp is brought into a dark apartment and I see who the company are. August 5, 1851
I am sobered by the moonlight. I bethink myself. It is like a cup of cold water to a thirsty man. August 5, 1851
What an entertainment for the traveller, this incessant motion apparently of the moon traversing the clouds! . . . You all alone, the moon all alone, overcoming with incessant victory whole squadrons of clouds . . . You cannot always calculate which one the moon will undertake next August 5, 1851
August 5, 2017
*****
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,the Propogation of the Willow.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Blackberries
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Blueberries
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, St. Johns-wort (Hypericum)
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Blue Heron
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, American Bittern (the Stake-Diver)
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Eastern Kingbird
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Western Sky
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Haymaking
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August Moods
*****
August 5, 2019
Sun warm on my back
I turn round and shade my face -
a beautiful life.
July 21, 1853
July 28, 1854 ("Methinks the season culminated about the middle of this month, — . . . having as it were attained the ridge of the summer, commenced to descend the long slope toward winter, the afternoon and down-hill of the year")
July 30, 1860 ("Am glad to press my way through Miles's Swamp. Thickets of choke-berry bushes higher than my head, with many of their lower leaves already red, alternating with young birches and raspberry, high blueberry andromeda (high and low), and great dense flat beds of Rubus sempervirens. Amid these, perhaps in cool openings, stands an island or two of great dark-green high blueberry bushes, with big cool blueberries,")
August 1, 1854 ("Meadow-haying begun for a week.”)
August 1, 1856 (“Since July 30th, inclusive, we have had perfect dog-days without interruption. The earth has suddenly invested with a thick musty mist. The sky has become a mere fungus. A thick blue musty veil of mist is drawn before the sun. The sun has not been visible, except for a moment or two once or twice a day, all this time, nor the stars by night. Moisture reigns.”)
August 1, 1856 ("It is about the richest color to be seen now . . .these bright beds of rhexia turn their faces to the heavens, seen only by the bitterns and other meadow birds that fly over.")
August 2, 1854 ("I am compelled to stand to write where a soft, faint light from the western sky came in between two willows")August 1, 1856 (“Since July 30th, inclusive, we have had perfect dog-days without interruption. The earth has suddenly invested with a thick musty mist. The sky has become a mere fungus. A thick blue musty veil of mist is drawn before the sun. The sun has not been visible, except for a moment or two once or twice a day, all this time, nor the stars by night. Moisture reigns.”)
August 1, 1856 ("It is about the richest color to be seen now . . .these bright beds of rhexia turn their faces to the heavens, seen only by the bitterns and other meadow birds that fly over.")
August 2, 1854 ("I am uncertain whether that so large and bright and high was a firefly or a shooting star. ")
Sitting on this rock
suddenly my life is a
fathomless ocean.
August 2, 1854
August 3, 1859 ("The haymakers are quite busy on the Great Meadows, it being drier than usual. It being remote from public view, some of them work in their shirts or half naked")
August 4, 1852 ("Most huckleberries and blueberries and low blackberries are in their prime now.")August 4, 1854 ("See a late rose still in flower.")
August 4, 1855 ("After sunset, I saw a flock of thousands of barn swallows and some white-bellied, and perhaps others. . . I supposed that they were preparing to migrate")
August 4, 1856 ("Conantum hillside is now literally black with berries . . . They are literally five or six species deep.")August 4, 1855 ("After sunset, I saw a flock of thousands of barn swallows and some white-bellied, and perhaps others. . . I supposed that they were preparing to migrate")
August 6, 1853 ("More dog-days. The sun, now at 9 a. m., has not yet burst through the mists.")
August 6, 1854 ("The Great Meadows are for the most part shorn.")August 6, 1855 ("Meadow-haying on all hands.")
August 6, 1856 ("Rubus hispidus ripe.")
August 6, 1858 (" We pass haymakers in every meadow. ")
To lie on your back
with nothing but space between
your eye and the stars.
August 8, 1852 ("I. . . am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another.")
August 12, 1851 ("There are but us three, the moon, the earth which wears this jewel (the moon’s reflection) in her crown, and myself.")There are but us three,
the moon, the earth, and myself–
(the moon’s reflection).
August 12, 1851
August 12, 1858 ("I eat the blueberry, but I am also interested in the rich-looking glossy black choke-berries which nobody eats, but which bend down the bushes on every side,—sweetish berries with a dry, and so choking, taste. Some of the bushes are more than a dozen feet high.")
August 14, 1852 ("Saw a rose still. There is such a haze that I cannot see the mountains.")
August 18, 1853 ("What means this sense of lateness that so comes over one now, — as if the rest of the year were down-hill, and if we had not performed anything before, we should not now?")
August 19, 1851("Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it.”)
August 23, 1858 ("There is no plateau on which Nature rests at midsummer, but she instantly commences the descent to winter.")
August 23, 1854 (“I find a new cranberry on the sphagnum . . .— V. Oxycoccus . . .It has small, now purplish-dotted fruit, flat on the sphagnum, some turned scarlet partly, on terminal peduncles, with slender, thread-like stems and small leaves strongly revolute on the edges.”)
August 26, 1860 ("I thread my way through the blueberry swamp in front of Martial Miles's. . . . And now a far greater show of choke-berries is here, rich to see.")August 28, 1858 ("I have crossed the summit ridge of the year and have begun to descend the'other slope. The prospect is now toward winter.")
September 2, 1856 ("Some years ago I sought for Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) hereabouts in vain, and concluded that it did not grow here. A month or two ago I read again, as many times before, that its blossoms were very small, scarcely a third as large as those of the common species, and for some unaccountable reason this distinction kept recurring to me, and I regarded the size of the flowers I saw, though I did not believe that it grew here; and in a day or two my eyes fell on it, aye, in three different places, and different varieties of it.")
September 7, 1852 (“Between the rocks on the summit, an abundance of large and fresh blueberries still”)
September 27, 1853 ("I cannot realize that on the tops of those cool blue ridges are in abundance berries still, bluer than themselves, as if they borrowed their blueness from their locality.")
August 5, 2023
If you make the least correctobservation of nature this year,you will have occasion to repeat itwith illustrations the next,and the season and life itself is prolonged.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 5A 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 © 2009-2022
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