A Book of the Seasons: January 13 (hoar frost, mist, vapor, clouds, ice, thaw, snow, music)

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.

January 13.

A drifting snow-storm

last night and to-day--the first

sleighing this winter.

January 13, 1853

The landscape is now

patches of bare ground and snow

running water, sun.

January 13, 1854

The cold spell over.

Here this morning is hoar frost--

a crystallized fog.

January 13, 1859

January 13, 2020

A drifting snow-storm last night and to-day, the first of consequence; and the first sleighing this winter. January 13, 1853

Sunrise. —A heavy lodging snow, almost rain, has been falling—how long? —coming from the eastward. The weather comparatively warm, but windy. It will probably turn to rain. Say four or five inches deep. It sticks to the sides of the houses.. . . January 13, 1856

It turns to rain before noon, four or five inches of very moist snow or sleet having fallen. January 13, 1856

Warm and wet, with rain-threatening clouds drifting from southwest. Muddy, wet, and slippery. January 13, 1855

Still warm and thawing, springlike; no freezing in the night, though high winds. January 13, 1854

The landscape is now patches of bare ground and snow; much running water with the sun reflected from it. January 13, 1854

Now, though clear and bright, all is moist and dissolving. January 13, 1854

Walden is covered with puddles, in which you see a dim reflection of the trees and hills on the grayish or light-colored snow-ice.January 13, 1854

The cold spell is over, and here this morning is a fog or mist. January 13, 1859

On the north side of every twig and other surface a very remarkable sort of hoar frost, the crystallized fog, which is still increasing. January 13, 1859

This is already full an inch deep on many trees, and gets to be much more, perhaps an inch and a half even, on some in the course of the day. It is quite rare here, at least on this scale. January 13, 1859

I can see about a quarter of a mile through the mist, and when, later, it is somewhat thinner, the woods, the pine woods, at a distance are a dark-blue color. January 13, 1859

I go to the river this morning and walk up it to see the trees and bushes along it. January 13, 1859

You must stand on the north side and look south at the trees, etc., when they appear, except the large limbs and trunk, wholly of snow or frostwork, mere ghosts of trees, seen softly against the mist for a background. January 13, 1859

It is mist on mist. The outline and character of each tree is more distinctly exhibited. January 13, 1859

The mist lasts all this day, though it is far from warm (+ 11° at 8 A. M.), and till noon of the 14th, when it becomes rain, and all this time there is exceedingly little if any wind. January 13, 1859

I see vapor rising from and curling along the open brook and also rising from the end of a plank in the sun, which is wet with melted snow, though the thermometer was 16° only when I left the house. January 13, 1860

The snow more than a foot deep over all the land. Few if any leave the beaten paths. January 13, 1852

The river is now completely concealed by snow. January 13, 1857

I come this way partly because it is the best walking here, the snow not so deep. January 13, 1857

In a very few places, for half a dozen feet the snow is blown off, revealing the dark transparent ice, in which I see numerous great white cleavages, which show its generous thickness, a foot at least. January 13, 1857

They cross each other at various angles and are frequently curved vertically, reflecting rainbow tints from within. January 13, 1857

The snow is drifted and much deeper about the button-bushes, January 13, 1857

The surface of the snow, now that the sun has shone on it so long, is not so light and downy, almost impalpable, as it was yesterday. 

January 13, 1860

I can see sparkles on it, but they are finer than at first and therefore less dazzling. January 13, 1860

The thin ice of the Mill Brook sides at the Turnpike bridge is sprinkled over with large crystals which look like asbestos or a coarse grain. January 13, 1860

This is no doubt the vapor of last evening crystallized. January 13, 1860

I see in low grounds numerous heads of bidens, with their seeds still. January 13, 1860

I see no tracks but of mice, and apparently of foxes, which have visited every muskrat-house and then turned short away. January 13, 1857

The only wildlife I notice is a crow on a distant oak. January 13, 1857

One man at the post-office said that a crow would drive a fox. He had seen three crows pursue a fox that was crossing the Great Meadows, and he fairly ran from [them] and took refuge in the woods. January 13, 1860

I see under some sizable white pines in E. Hubbard's wood, where red squirrels have run about much since this snow. . . The scales of the white pine cones are scattered about here and there. January 13, 1860

Picked up a pitch pine cone which had evidently been cut off by a squirrel. The successive grooves made by his teeth while probably he bent it down were quite distinct. The woody stem was a quarter of an inch thick, and I counted eight strokes of his chisel. January 13, 1855

Am surprised to see, returning, how much it has drifted in the Corner road . . .driving the traveller into the neighboring field, having some taken down the fence. January 13, 1857

Here I am on the Cliffs at half past three or four o'clock. January 13, 1852

Clear sky and bright sun. January 13, 1852

A few clouds are floating overhead, downy and dark. January 13, 1852

I see a long, light-textured cloud stretching from north to south, stretching over half the heavens; and underneath it, in the west, flitting mother-o'-pearl clouds, which change their loose-textured form and melt rapidly away, even while I write. January 13, 1852

Before I can complete this sentence, I look up and they are gone, like the steam from the engine in the winter air. January 13, 1852

Even a considerable cloud is dissolved and dispersed in a minute or two, and nothing is left but the pure ether. January 13, 1852

Then another comes by magic, is born out of the pure blue empyrean, and now this too has disappeared, and no one knows whither it is gone. January 13, 1852

I hear one thrumming a guitar below stairs. It reminds me of moments that I have lived. January 13, 1857

What a comment on our life is the least strain of music! It lifts me up above all the dust and mire of the universe. January 13, 1857

We hear the kindred vibrations, music! and we put out our dormant feelers unto the limits of the universe. January 13, 1857

When I hear music I fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest. January 13, 1857

You are compelled to look at the sky for the earth is invisible. 

January 13, 1852

January 13, 2014

. . 

*****

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the American Crow

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Snow-storms might be classified.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The White Pines  

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, A body awake in the world.

*****

March 1, 1858 ("We have just had a winter with absolutely no sleighing.")

March 3, 1855 (“A few rods from the broad pitch pine beyond, I find a cone which was probably dropped by a squirrel in the fall, for I see the marks of its teeth where it was cut off; and it has probably been buried by the snow till now, for it has apparently just opened, and I shake its seeds out. . . . Most fallen pitch pine cones show the marks of squirrels’ teeth, showing they were cut off.”)

June 24, 1852 (“What could a man learn by watching the clouds?”)

August 3, 1852 (" At the east window. — A temperate noon. I hear a cricket creak in the shade; also the sound of a distant piano. . . .A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. . . .I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree.”)

August 9, 1860 ("All at once a small cloud begins to form half a mile from the summit and rapidly grows in a mysterious manner till it drapes and conceals the summit above us for a few moments, then passes off and disappears northeastward just as it had come.”)

October 6 1857 ("Going through Ebby Hubbard's woods, I see thousands of white pine cones on the ground, fresh light brown, which lately opened and shed their seeds and lie curled up on the ground.")

November 23, 1852 (“You must go forth very early to see a hoar frost, which is rare here”);

November 29, 1856 ("This is the first snow.”)
December 3, 1854 ("The first snow of consequence fell in the evening, very damp (wind northeast); five or six inches deep in morning.”)

December 4, 1859 ("Awake to winter, and snow two or three inches deep, the first of any consequence.")

December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified . . . this is a fine, dry snow, drifting nearly horizontally from the north, so that it is quite blinding to face")

December 14, 1859 ( "Snow-storms might be classified. .. . there is sleet, which is half snow, half rain.")

December 16 1853 (“These days, when the earth is still bare and the weather is so warm as to create much vapor by day, are the best for these frost works.”)

December 22, 1860 ("This evening and night, the second important snow, there having been sleighing since the 4th, and now")
December 26, 1853 ("The first snow of any consequence thus far. It is about three inches deep.”)
December 26, 1857 ("Snows all day, — first snow of any consequence, three or four inches in all.")

December 31, 1853("I hear very distinctly from the railroad causeway the whistle of the locomotive on the Lowell road. . . . It, as it were, takes me out of my body and gives me the freedom of all bodies and all nature. . . . The contact of sound with a human ear whose hearing is pure and unimpaired is coincident with an ecstasy. ") 
January 2, 1860 ("The past December has been remarkable for steady cold, or coldness, and sleighing.")

January 8, 1856 (“All of the pitch pine cones that I see, but one, are open.”)

January 8, 1860 ("The sloshy edges of the puddles are the frames of so many wave-shaped mirrors in which the leather-colored oak leaves, and the dark-green pines and their stems, on the hillside, are reflected.")

January 12, 1860 ("Such is the glitter or sparkle on the surface of a snow freshly fallen when the sun comes out and you walk from it, the points of light constantly changing.")

January 14, 1853 ("Snow freshly fallen is one thing, to-morrow it will be another.")

January 15, 1857 ("What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps?”)

January 21, 1855 ("The snow is turning to rain through a fine hail. Pines and oaks seen at a distance — say two miles off — are considerably blended and make one harmonious impression. The former, if you attend, are seen to be of a blue or misty black," )

January 22, 1856 (“At Walden, near my old residence, I find that since I was here on the 11th, apparently within a day or two, some gray or red squirrel or squirrels have been feeding on the pitch pine cones extensively. The snow under one young pine is covered quite thick with the scales they have dropped while feeding overhead.”)

January 26, 1856 ("We have had good sleighing ever since the 26th of December and no thaw.")

February 6, 1852 ("Mistiness makes the woods look denser, darker, and more imposing.")

February 7, 1857 (“The water on the ice is for the most part several inches deep, and trees reflected in it appear as when seen through a mist or smoke, apparently owing to the color of the ice.”)

February 7, 1856 ("During the rain the air is thick, the distant woods bluish, and the single trees on the hill, under the dull mist-covered sky, remarkably distinct and black.")

February 7, 1859 ("Evidently the distant woods are more blue in a warm and moist or misty day in winter.")

February 8, 1856 ("At this hour the crust sparkles with a myriad brilliant points or mirrors, one to every six inches, at least.")

February 9, 1860 ("A hoar frost on the ground this morning — for the open fields are mostly bare — was quite a novel sight. I had noticed some vapor in the air late last evening")

February 12, 1855 (“All trees covered this morning with a hoar frost, very handsome looking toward the sun, —the ghosts of trees.”)

February 15, 1859 ("We walk through almost invisible puddles on the river and meadows, in which we see the trees, etc., reflected.")

January 13, 2018

If you make the least correct 

observation of nature this year,

 you will have occasion to repeat it

 with illustrations the next, 

and the season and life itself is prolonged.

  April 7, 1853 

January 12 <<<<<<<<   January 13 >>>>>>>>  January 14

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 13

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 ©  2009-2023

 tinyurl.com/HDT13Jan