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
daybreak
September 3, 2018
Now is the season
for beautiful berries which
are not food for man.
Here is a beautiful, and perhaps first decidedly autumnal, day, – a, cloudless sky, a clear air, with, maybe, veins of coolness. September 3, 1860
Now is the season for those comparatively rare but beautiful wild
berries which are not food for man . . . To fill my basket with the neglected but beautiful fruit of the various species of cornels and viburnums, poke, arum, medeola, thorns, etc. September 3, 1853
Berries which are as beautiful as flowers, but far less known, the fruit of the flower. September 3, 1853
I find one sassafras berry, dark-blue in its crimson cup, club-shaped. September 3, 1856
Gather four or five quarts of Viburnum nudum berries, now in their prime, attracted more by the beauty of the cymes than the flavor of the fruit. The berries, which are of various sizes and forms, — elliptical, oblong, or globular, — are in different stages of maturity on the same cyme, and so of different colors, — green or white, rose-colored, and dark purple or black, — i. e. three or four very distinct and marked colors, side by side. If gathered when rose-colored, they soon turn dark purple and are soft and edible, though before bitter. They add a new and variegated wildness to the swampy sprout-lands. Remarkable for passing through so many stages of color before they arrive at maturity. A singular and pleasing contrast, also, do the different kinds of viburnum and cornel berries present when compared with each other. September 3, 1856
I look for fringed gentian. September 3, 1856
In the meadow southwest of Hubbard's Hill saw white Polygala sanguinea, not described. September 3, 1854
Polygala sanguinea is now as abundant, at least, as at any time, and perhaps more conspicuous in the meadows where I look for fringed gentian. September 3, 1856
Fall dandelions stand thick in the meadows. September 3, 1851
Walk often in drizzly weather, for then the small weeds (especially if they stand on bare ground), covered with rain-drops like beads, appear more beautiful than ever, -- the hypericums, for instance. They are equally beautiful when covered with dew, fresh and adorned, almost spirited away, in a robe of dewdrops. September 3, 1851
The narrow brown sheaths from the base of white pine leaves now strew the ground and are washed up on the edge of puddles after the rain. September 3, 1858
Even at this season I see some fleets of yellow butterflies in the damp road after the rain, as earlier. September 3, 1854
The river smooth, though full, with the autumn sheen on it, as on the leaves. September 3, 1856
I see painted tortoises with their entire backs covered with perfectly fresh clean black scales, such as no rubbing nor varnishing can produce, contrasting advantageously with brown and muddy ones. One little one floats past on a drifting pad which he partly sinks. September 3, 1856
I see where the bank by the Pokelogan is whitewashed, i. e. the grass, for a yard or two square, by the thin droppings of some bird which has roosted on a dead limb above. It was probably a blue heron, for I find some slate-blue feathers dropped, apparently curving breast feathers, broadly shafted with white. September 3, 1858
I hear a faint warble from time to time from some young or old birds, from my window these days. Is it the purple finch again, — young birds practicing? September 3, 1858
A slate-colored snowbird back. September 3, 1857
Of late I have not heard the wood thrush. September 3, 1852
Though it is warm enough, I notice again the swarms of fuzzy gnats dancing in the cooler air, which also is decidedly autumnal. September 3, 1860
See no fireflies. September 3, 1852
A strong wind, which blows down much fruit. R. W. E. sits surrounded by choice windfall pears. September 3, 1859
The winds which the sun has aroused go down at evening, and the lunar influence may then perchance be detected. September 3, 1852
I will endeavor to separate the tide in my thoughts, or what is due to the influence of the moon, from the current distractions and fluctuations. September 3, 1852
1 A. M., moon waning . . . I hear an apple fall, as I go along the road. September 3, 1852
My thoughts suffered a sea-turn. September 3, 1854
September 3, 2023
September 3, 2023
*****
July 26, 1854 ("Today I see in various parts of the town the yellow butterflies in fleets in the road, on bare damp sand, twenty or more collected within a diameter of five or six inches in many places.")
August 12, 1854 ("Have not heard a wood thrush since last week of July.")
August 14, 1853 ("I hear no wood thrushes for a week.")
August 26, 1853 ("The fall dandelion is as conspicuous and abundant now in Tuttle's meadow as buttercups in the spring. It takes their place.")
August 29, 1852 ("The ground in orchards is covered with windfalls; imperfect fruits now fall")
August 31, 1856 ("A painted tortoise shedding its scales.”)
September 1, 1856 ("S. nemoralis, not quite in prime, but very abundant.")
September 1, 1859 ("The autumnal dandelion is a prevailing flower now, but since it shuts up in the afternoon it might not be known as common unless you were out in the morning or in a dark afternoon..")
September 2, 1856 ("Clear bright days of late, with a peculiar sheen on the leaves”)
September 2, 1859 ("The sarothra grows thickly, and is now abundantly in bloom, on denuded places, i.e., where the sod and more or less soil has been removed, by sandy roadsides.")
Clear air cloudless sky
decidedly autumnal
a beautiful day
September 5, 1857 ("I now see those brown shaving like stipules of the white pine leaves, which are falling, i.e. the stipules, and caught in cobwebs.”)
September 11, 1859 ("This being a cloudy and somewhat rainy day, the autumnal dandelion is open in the afternoon.")
September 13, 1852 ("Yesterday, it rained all day, with considerable wind, which has strewn the ground with apples and peaches, and, all the country over, people are busy picking up the windfalls")
September 24,1854 ("On the large sassafras trees on the hill I see many of the handsome red club-shaped pedicels left, with their empty cups . . .”)
September 3, 2022
to separate
the tide in my thoughts
from
the current distractions
and fluctuations
September 3, 2022
January 22, 1852 ("My thoughts are my company."); March 1, 1860 ("I have thoughts, as I walk, on some subject that is running in my head, but all their pertinence seems gone before I can get home to set them down"); June 6, 1857 (“A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature. ”); July 26, 1853 ("I mark again the sound of crickets or locusts about alders, etc. about this time when the first asters open . . . Such little objects check the diffuse tide of our thoughts and bring it to a head, which thrills us.");] August 7, 1854 ("Do you not feel the fruit of your spring and summer beginning to ripen, to harden its seed within you? Do not your thoughts begin to acquire consistency as well as flavor and ripeness?"); September 14, 1859 (""Like the fruits, when cooler weather and frosts arrive, we too are braced and ripened. . . . our green and leafy and pulpy thoughts acquire color and flavor, and perchance a sweet nuttiness at last.); September 21, 1851 ("Is not the poet who walks by night conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence, in which the ocean within him overflows its shores and bathes the dry land? Has he not his spring-tides and his neap-tides, the former sometimes combining with the winds of heaven to produce those memorable high tides of the calendar which leave their marks for ages?")
September 3, 2023
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.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, September 3
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/HDT03SEPT
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