The light of the setting sun suddenly lighting up the needles of the white pine

November 22.

November 22, 2021

The milkweed pods by the roadside are yet but half emptied of their silky contents. For months the gales are dispersing their seeds, though we have had snow.

Saw E. Hosmer this afternoon making a road for himself along a hillside (I being on my way to Saw Mill Brook ).  He turned over a stone, and I saw under it many crickets and ants still lively, which had gone into winter quarters there apparently. There were many little galleries leading under the stone, indenting the hardened earth like veins.  (Mem. Turn over a rock in midwinter and see if you can find them.) That is the reason, then, that I have not heard the crickets lately. I have frequently seen them lurking under the eaves or portico of a stone, even in midsummer.

At the brook the partridge-berries checker the ground with their leaves, now interspersed with red berries.

The cress at the bottom of the brook is doubly beautiful now, because it is green while most other plants are sere. It rises and falls and waves with the current.

There are many young hornbeams there which still retain their withered leaves.

As I returned through Hosmer's field, the sun was setting just beneath a black cloud by which it had been obscured, and as it had been a cold and windy afternoon, its light, which fell suddenly on some white pines between me and it, lighting them up like a shimmering fire, and also on the oak leaves and chestnut stems, was quite a circumstance. 

It was from the contrast between the dark and comfortless afternoon and this bright and cheerful light, almost fire.

The eastern hills and woods, too, were clothed in a still golden light.

The light of the setting sun, just emerged from a cloud and suddenly falling on and lighting up the needles of the white pine between you and it, after a raw and louring afternoon near the beginning of winter, is a memorable phenomenon.

A sort of Indian summer in the day, which thus far has been denied to the year.

After a cold gray day this cheering light almost warms us by its resemblance to fire.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 22, 1851

The milkweed pods by the roadside are yet but half emptied of their silky contents. See September 10, 1860 ("If you sit at an open attic window almost anywhere, about the 20th of September, you will see many a milkweed down go sailing by on a level with you, though commonly it has lost its freight, — notwithstanding that you may not know of any of these plants growing in your neighborhood."); September 21, 1856 ("Asclepias Cornuti discounting."); October 19, 1856 ("The Asclepias Cornuti pods are now apparently in the midst of discounting."); October 23, 1852 ("The milkweed (Syriaca) now rapidly discounting. The lanceolate pods having opened, the seeds spring out on the least jar, or when dried by the sun, and form a little fluctuating white silky mass or tuft, each held by the extremities of the fine threads, until a stronger puff of wind sets them free"); October 25, 1858 ("Near the end of the causeway, milkweed is copiously discounting."); November 20, 1858 ("The common milkweed (Asclepias Cornuti) and some thistles still discounting.") 

Gone into winter quarters there apparently . . . That is the reason, then, that I have not heard the crickets lately. See November 19, 1857 ("Turning up a stone on Fair Haven Hill, I find many small dead crickets about the edges, which have endeavored to get under it and apparently have been killed by the frost.") See also November 8, 1853 ("Perchance I heard the last cricket of the season yesterday. They chirp here and there at longer and longer intervals, till the snow quenches their song."); November 11, 1855 ("Frogs are rare and sluggish, as if going into winter quarters. A cricket also sounds rather rare and distinct. "); November 11, 1858 ("Hear a few of the common cricket on the side of Clamshell. Thus they are confined now to the sun on the south sides of hills and woods. They are quite silent long before sunset."); November 12, 1853 ("The last cricket, full of cheer and faith, piping to himself, as the last man might");November 13, 1851 ("Not a mosquito left. Not an insect to hum. Crickets gone into winter quarters."); November 13, 1858 (Frozen ground, ice, and snow have now banished the few remaining skaters (if there were any ?), crickets, and water-bugs.") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Cricket in November (listening for the last cricket)

At the brook the partridge-berries checker the ground with their leaves, now interspersed with red berries. See November 16, 1850 (“The partridge-berry leaves checker the ground on the side of moist hillsides in the woods. Are they not properly called checker-berries ?”);   November 19, 1850 ("The partridge-berry and checkerberry, and winter-green leaves even, are more conspicuous.”); November 27, 1853 ("Checkerberries and partridge-berries are both numerous and obvious now"); December 3, 1853 ("The still green Mitchella repens and checkerberry in shelter, both with fruit"); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Partridge-berry (Mitchella Repens)

The light of the setting sun, just emerged from a cloud and suddenly falling on and lighting up the needles of the white pine. . . .After a cold gray day this cheering light almost warms us by its resemblance to fire. See November 23, 1851 ("Another such a sunset to - night as the last."); November 25, 1851 ("That kind of sunset which I witnessed on Saturday and Sunday is perhaps peculiar to the late autumn. The sun is unseen behind a hill. Only this bright white light like a fire falls on the trembling needles of the pine.") See also  August 28, 1860 ("Just before setting, the sun comes out into a clear space in the horizon and a sudden blaze of light falls on east end of the pond and the hillside. At this angle a double amount of bright sunlight reflects from the water up to the underside of the still very fresh green leaves of the bushes and trees on the shore and on Pine Hill, revealing the most vivid and varied shades of green."); October 21, 1857 (" It has just come out beneath a great cold slate-colored cloud that occupies most of the western sky . . . and now its rays, slanting over the hill in whose shadow I float, fall on the eastern trees and hills with a thin, yellow light like a clear yellow wine, but somehow it reminds me that now the hearth-side is getting to be a more comfortable place than out-of-doors. "); October 28, 1852 (“Suddenly the light of the setting sun yellows and warms all the landscape.”); October 28, 1857 ("All at once a low-slanted glade of sunlight from one of heaven’s west windows behind me fell on the bare gray maples, lighting them up with an incredibly intense and pure white light; then, going out there, it lit up some white birch stems south of the pond, then the gray rocks and the pale reddish young oaks of the lower cliffs, and then the very pale brown meadow-grass, and at last the brilliant white breasts of two ducks, tossing on the agitated surface far off on the pond, which I had not detected before. It was but a transient ray, and there was no sunshine afterward, but the intensity of the light was surprising and impressive, like a halo, a glory in which only the just deserved to live.. . . It was a serene, elysian light, in which the deeds I have dreamed of but not realized might have been performed. At the eleventh hour, late in the year, we have visions of the life we might have lived."); November 9, 1858 (“ We had a true November sunset after a dark, cloudy afternoon. The sun reached a clear stratum just before setting, beneath the dark cloud, though ready to enter another on the horizon’s edge, and a cold, yellow sunlight suddenly illumined the withered grass of the fields around, near and far, eastward. Such a phenomenon as, when it occurs later, I call the afterglow of the year."); November 10, 1858 ("A cool and silvery light is the prevailing one; dark-blue or slate-colored clouds in the west, and the sun going down in them. All the light of November may be called an afterglow. "); November 17, 1858 ("We are interested at this season by the manifold ways in which the light is reflected to us. . . . The setting sun, too, is reflected from windows more brightly than at any other season. “November Lights" would be a theme for me. "); November 17, 1859 (“How fair and memorable this prospect when you stand opposite to the sun, these November afternoons, and look over the red andromeda swamp”); November 18, 1857 ("The sunlight is a peculiarly thin and clear yellow, falling on the pale-brown bleaching herbage of the fields at this season. There is no redness in it. This is November sunlight."); November 20, 1858 ("The glory of November is in its silvery, sparkling lights reflected from a myriad of surfaces. See November 28, 1856 ("3.30 p. m., the sunlight reflected from the many ascending twigs . . . It is a true November phenomenon."); November 29, 1852 ("about 4 o'clock, the sun sank below some clouds, or they rose above it, and it shone out with that bright, calm, memorable light which I have else where described, lighting up the pitch pines and everything. "); November 29, 1853 (Suddenly a glorious yellow sunlight falls on all the eastern landscape. . . I think that we have some such sunsets as this, and peculiar to the season, every year. I should call it the russet afterglow of the year.""); December 25, 1858 ("Now that the sun is setting, all its light seems to glance over the snow-clad pond and strike the rocky shore under the pitch pines at the northeast end. Though the bare rocky shore there is only a foot or a foot and a half high as I look, it reflects so much light that the rocks are singularly distinct") 

After a cold gray day. See November 18, 1852 ("These are cold, gray days.")