Fair Haven Pond, methinks, never looks so handsome as at this season.

Fair Haven lies more open

and can be seen from more distant points

than any of our ponds. The water or lake

from however distant a point seen

is always the centre of the landscape.

The pond is now most beautifully framed

with the autumn-tinted woods and hills.

Birches hickories aspens in the distance

are like innumerable small flames

on the hillsides about the pond.

Fair Haven Pond, methinks,

never looks so handsome 

as at this season.

Henry Thoreau

October 13, 1852

October 13, 2019

In all my rambles I have seen no landscape which can make me forget Fair Haven. I still sit on its Cliff in a new spring day, and look over the awakening woods and the river, and hear the new birds sing, with the same delight as ever. It is as sweet a mystery to me as ever, what this world is. May, 1850

Fair Haven Pond with its island, and meadow between the island and the shore, and a strip of perfectly still and smooth water in the lee of the island, and two hawks, fish hawks perhaps, sailing over it. I do not see how it can be improved. How adapted these forms and colors to my eye! A meadow and an island! I am made to love the pond and the meadow, as the wind is made to ripple the water. November 21, 1850

One afternoon in the fall, November 21st, I saw Fair Haven Pond with its island and meadow; between the island and the shore, a strip of perfectly smooth water in the lee of the island; and two hawks sailing over it; and something more I saw which cannot easily be described. February 14, 1851

To-day no part of the heavens is so clear and bright as Fair Haven Pond and the river. October 12, 1851

Fair Haven Pond – the pond, the meadow beyond the button-bush and willow curve, the island, and the meadow between the island and mainland with its own defining lines – are all parted off like the parts of a mirror. A fish hawk is calmly sailing over all. April 14, 1852

I land at Lee's Cliff, in Fair Haven Pond, and sit on the Cliff. Late in the afternoon. The wind is gone down; the water is smooth; a serene evening is approaching; the clouds are dispersing. The pond, so smooth and full of reflections after a dark and breezy day, is unexpectedly beautiful. August 31, 1852

Day before yesterday to the Cliffs in the rain, misty rain. As I approached their edge, I saw the woods beneath, Fair Haven Pond, and the hills across the river, — which, owing to the mist, was as far as I could see, and seemed much further in consequence. I saw these between the converging boughs of two white pines a rod or two from me on the edge of the rock; and I thought that there was no frame to a landscape equal to this, — to see, between two near pine boughs, whose lichens are distinct, a distant forest and lake, the one frame, the other picture. November 1, 1852

The ice in Fair Haven is more than half melted, and now the woods beyond the pond, reflected in its serene water where there has been opaque ice so long, affect me as they perhaps will not again this year. March 18,1853

I sit now on a rock on the west slope of Fair Haven orchard, an hour before sunset, this warm, almost sultry evening, the air filled with the sweetness of apple blossoms . . . the sun partly concealed behind a low cloud in the west, the air cleared by last evening's thunder-shower, the river now beautifully smooth . . . full of light and reflecting the placid western sky and the dark woods which overhang it. I was surprised, on turning round, to behold the serene and everlasting beauty of the world, it was so soothing. I saw that I could not go home to supper and lose it. It was so much fairer, serener, more beautiful, than my mood had been. . . The perfect smoothness of Fair Haven Pond, full of light and reflecting the wood so distinctly, while still occasionally the sun shines warm and brightly from behind a cloud, giving the completest contrast of sunshine and shade, is enough to make this hour memorable. May 17, 1853 

I am entering Fair Haven Pond. It is now perfectly still and smooth, like dark glass. Yet the westering sun is very warm. He who passes over a lake at noon, when the waves run, little imagines its serene and placid beauty at evening, as little as he anticipates his own serenity. There is no more beautiful part of the river than the entrance to this pond. July 21, 1853

How many times I have been surprised  thus, on turning about on this very spot, at the fairness of the earth! May 22, 1854 

We are tempted to call these the finest days of the year. Take Fair Haven Pond, for instance, a perfectly level plain of white snow, untrodden as yet by any fisherman, surrounded by snow-clad hills, dark evergreen woods, and reddish oak leaves, so pure and still. December 21, 1854

Now look down on Fair Haven. How pleasant in spring a still, overcast, warm day like this, when the water is smooth! April 26, 1854

All the earth is bright; the very pines glisten, and the water is a bright blue. A gull is circling round Fair Haven Pond, seen white against the woods and hillsides, looking as if it would dive for a fish every moment, and occasionally resting on the ice. April 4, 1855

The sun is near setting, away beyond Fair Haven. A bewitching stillness reigns through all the woodland and over the snow-clad landscape . . .  The pond is perfectly smooth and full of light. December 9, 1856

I sit on the top of Lee's Cliff, looking into the light and dark eye of the lake. May 29, 1857

When I turn round half-way up Fair Haven Hill, by the orchard wall, and look northwest, I am surprised for the thousandth time at the beauty of the landscape.   October 7, 1857

Looking all around Fair Haven Pond yesterday, where the maples were glowing amid the evergreens, my eyes invariably rested on a particular small maple of the purest and intensest scarlet. October 3, 1858

See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, October 13

Always the center –

the pond is now framed with the

autumn-tinted woods.

October 13, 1852

 A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Fair Haven Pond

 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 ©  2009-2024

In the crucible of my celibate life

purified of all desire

I enter truth from behind

and call her name –

Simplify!

tinyurl.com/HDTfairhvn

The satisfaction of existence.

November 25

I feel a little alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. 

November 25, 2017

I would fain forget all my morning's occupation, my obligations to society. But some times it happens that I cannot easily shake off the village; the thought of some work, some surveying, will run in my head, and I am not where my body is, I am out of my senses.

In my walks I would return to my senses like a bird or a beast.

What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

This afternoon, late and cold as it is, has been a sort of Indian summer. Indeed, I think that we have summer days from time to time the winter through, and that it is often the snow on the ground makes the whole difference.

This afternoon the air was indescribably clear and exhilarating, and though the thermometer would have shown it to be cold, I thought that there was a finer and purer warmth than in summer; a wholesome, intellectual warmth, in which the body was warmed by the mind's contentment. The warmth was hardly sensuous, but rather the satisfaction of existence.


I found Fair Haven skimmed entirely over, though the stones which I threw down on it from the high bank on the east broke through.Yet the river was open.

The landscape looked singularly clean and pure and dry, the air, like a pure glass, being laid over the picture, the trees so tidy, stripped of their leaves; the meadows and pastures, clothed with clean dry grass, looked as if they had been swept; ice on the water and winter in the air, but yet not a particle of snow on the ground.

The woods, divested in great part of their leaves, are being ventilated.

It is the season of perfect works, of hard, tough, ripe twigs, not of tender buds and leaves. The leaves have made their wood, and a myriad new withes stand up all around pointing to the sky, able to survive the cold.

It is only the perennial that you see, the iron age of the year.

These expansions of the river skim over before the river itself takes on its icy fetters. What is the analogy?



I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice. He is a man wilder than Ray or Melvin. While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of a man, that is all.

He would dive when I went nearer, then reappear again, and had kept open a place five or six feet square so that it had not frozen, by swimming about in it. Then he would sit on the edge of the ice and busy himself about something, I could not see whether it was a clam or not.

What a cold blooded fellow! thoughts at a low temperature, sitting perfectly still so long on ice covered with water, mumbling a cold, wet clam in its shell. What safe, low, moderate thoughts it must have! It does not get on to stilts.

The generations of muskrats do not fail. They are not preserved by the legislature of Massachusetts.


Boats are drawn up high which will not be launched again till spring.


There is a beautiful fine wild grass which grows in the path in sprout land, now dry, white, and waving, in light beds soft to the touch.

I experience such an interior comfort, far removed from the sense of cold, as if the thin atmosphere were rarefied by heat, were the medium of invisible flames, as if the whole landscape were one great hearthside, that where the shrub oak leaves rustle on the hillside, I seem to hear a crackling fire and see the pure flame, and I wonder that the dry leaves do not blaze into yellow flames.

I find but little change yet on the south side of the Cliffs; only the leaves of the wild apple are a little frostbitten on their edges and curled dry there, but some wild cherry leaves and blueberries are still fresh and tender green and red, as well as all the other leaves and plants which I noticed there the other day.

When I got up so high on the side of the Cliff the sun was setting like an Indian-summer sun. There was a purple tint in the horizon. It was warm on the face of the rocks, and I could have sat till the sun disappeared, to dream there. It was a mild sunset such as is to be attended to. 

November 25, 2021

Just as the sun shines into us warmly and serenely, our Creator breathes on us and re-creates us.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 25, 1850

What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? See Walking (“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. … But sometimes it happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is. I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” ); August 21, 1851 ("A man may walk abroad and no more see the sky than if he walked under a shed."); November 18 1851 ("The chopper who works in the woods all day is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them.. . .A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going."); November 6, 1853 (“It is remarkable how little we attend to what is passing before us constantly, unless our genius directs our attention that way.”); January 7, 1857 ("I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it. I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America, out of my head and be sane a part of every day. . . .and therefore I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified.");September 13, 1859 ("Few live so far outdoors as to hear the first geese go over."); February 12, 1860 ("Surrounded by our thoughts or imaginary objects, living in our ideas, not one in a million ever sees the objects which are actually around him."); 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.") See also December 20, 1851 ("Go out before sunrise or stay out till sunset "); December 29, 1856 (“We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day. . . .. Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always.”)

I found Fair Haven skimmed entirely over, . . . Yet the river was open. . . .Boats are drawn up high which will not be launched again till spring See November 18, 1858 ("Am surprised to see Fair Haven Pond completely frozen over during the last four days. It will probably open again."); November 21, 1852 ("I am surprised this afternoon to find the river skimmed over in some places, and Fair Haven Pond one-third frozen or skimmed over, though commonly there is scarcely any ice to be observed along the shores."); November 23, 1852 ("I am surprised to see Fair Haven entirely skimmed over"); November 24, 1858 ("Fair Haven Pond is closed still ");. November 26, 1855 ("The ice next the shore bears me and my boat"); November 26, 1857 ("Got my boat up this afternoon. (It is Thanksgiving Day.) One end had frozen in"):November 26, 1858 ("Got in boat on account of Reynolds’s new fence going up (earlier than usual)."); November 29, 1860 ("Get up my boat, 7 a. m. Thin ice of the night is floating down the river."); November 30, 1855 ("River skimmed over behind Dodd’s and elsewhere. Got in my boat. River remained iced over all day."); November 30, 1858 ("The river may be said to have frozen generally last night.")
.

When I got up so high on the side of the Cliff the sun was setting . . . and I could have sat till the sun disappeared.  See November 25, 1851 ("the sun had set and there was a very clear amber light in the west, and, turning about, we were surprised at the darkness in the east, the crescent of night, almost as if the air were thick, a thick snow-storm were gathering, which, as we had faced the west, we were not prepared for; yet the air was clear."); November 25, 1857 ("I shiver about awhile on Pine Hill, waiting for the sun to set. Methinks the air is dusky soon after four these days. . . . There is the sun a quarter of an hour high, shining on it through a perfectly clear sky, but to my eye it is singularly dark or dusky. And now the sun has disappeared"); November 27, 1853 ("The days are short enough now. The sun is already setting before I have reached the ordinary limit of my walk."); November 28, 1859 ("We make a good deal of the early twilights of these November days, they make so large a part of the afternoon.") See also December 25, 1851 (“I go forth to see the sun set. Who knows how it will set, even half an hour beforehand ?”) June 5, 1854 ("I have come to this hill to see the sun go down, to recover sanity and put myself again in relation with Nature.”); August 14, 1854 ("I have come forth to this hill at sunset. . . to behold and commune with something grander than man.”)

The satisfaction of existence . . . our Creator breathes on us and re-creates us. SeeJune 22, 1851 ("Sometimes we are clarified and calmed . . ., so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to our selves . All the world goes by us and is reflected in our deeps . . . . We live and rejoice . . . I feel my Maker blessing me."); July 16, 1851 (" My life was ecstasy. In youth,. . .I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction;. . .To have such sweet impressions made on us, such ecstasies begotten of the breezes! I can remember how I was astonished. I said to myself, — I said to others, — "There comes into my mind such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion, and [I] have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. . . .. The maker of me is improving me."); 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. I become more collected and composed, and sensible of my own existence, as when a lamp is brought into a dark apartment. ... I am sobered by the moonlight. I bethink myself.”); August 23, 1852 ("There is something invigorating in this air, which I am peculiarly sensible is a real wind blowing from over the surface of a planet.”);December 11, 1855 ("To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired. My body is all sentient. As I go here or there, I am tickled by this or that I come in contact with, as if I touched the wires of a battery. The age of miracles is each moment thus returned. Now it is wild apples, now river reflections, now a flock of lesser redpolls.”) March 30, 1853 ("Ah, those youthful days! are they never to return? when the walker . . . sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself, - the phenomena that show themselves in him, - his expanding body, his intellect and heart.”)

This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence that I have not procured myself. See May 23, 1854("There was a time when the beauty and the music were all within, and I sat and listened to my thoughts, and there was a song in them. I sat for hours on rocks and wrestled with the melody which possessed me. I sat and listened by the hour to a positive though faint and distant music . . .. When I walked with a joy which knew not its own origin.")

Rowed about twenty-four miles.

October 15. 

Wednesday. 8.30 A. M. Up the river in a boat to Pelham's Pond with W. E. C. 

(But first 

• a neighbor sent in a girl to inquire if I knew where worm-seed grew, otherwise called “Jerusalem oak” (so said the recipe which she brought cut out of a newspaper), for her mistress's hen had the “gapes.” But I answered that this was a Southern plant and  knew not where it was to be had. Referred her to the poultry book. 
• Also the next proprietor commenced stoning and settling down the stone for a new well, an operation which I wished to witness, purely beautiful, simple, and necessary. The stones laid on a wheel, and continually added to above as it is settled down by digging under the wheel.
• Also Goodwin, with a partridge and a stout mess of large pickerel, applied to me to dispose of a mud turtle which he had found moving the mud in a ditch. Some men will be in the way to see such movements.)

The muskrat-houses appear now for the most part to be finished. Some, it is true, are still rising. They line the river all the way. Some are as big as small hay cocks.

The river is still quite low, though a foot or more higher than when I was last on it.

There is quite a wind, and the sky is full of flitting clouds, so that sky and water are quite unlike that warm, bright, transparent day when I last sailed on the river, when the surface was of such oily smoothness.

You could not now study the river bottom for the black waves and the streaks of foam.

When the sun shines brightest to-day, its pyramidal-shaped sheen (when for a short time we are looking up-stream, for we row) is dazzling and blinding.

It is pleasant to hear the sound of the waves and feel the surging of the boat, — an inspiriting sound, as if you were bound on adventures. It is delightful to be tossed about in such a harmless storm, and see the waves look so angry and black.

We see objects on shore-trees, etc., — much better from the boat, — from a low point of view. It brings them against the sky, into a novel point of view at least.

The otherwise low on the meadows, as well as the hills, is conspicuous.

I perceive that the bulrushes are nibbled along the shore, as if they had been cut by a scythe, yet in such positions as no mower could have reached, even outside the flags. Probably the muskrat was the mower, for his houses.

In this cool sunlight, Fair Haven Hill shows to advantage. Every rock and shrub and protuberance has justice done it, the sun shining at an angle on the hill and giving each a shadow. The hills have a hard and distinct outline, and I see into their very texture.

On Fair Haven I see the sunlit light-green grass in the hollows where snow makes water sometimes, and on the russet slopes.

Cut three white pine boughs opposite Fair Haven, and set them up in the bow of our boat for a sail. It was pleasant to hear the water begin to ripple under the prow, telling of our easy progress. We thus without a tack made the south side of Fair Haven, then threw our sails overboard, and the moment after mistook them for green bushes or weeds which had sprung from the bottom unusually far from shore.

Then to hear the wind sough in your sail, — that is to be a sailor and hear a land sound.

The grayish-whitish mikania, all fuzzy, covers the endless button-bushes, which are now bare of leaves.

Observed the verification of the Scripture saying "as a dog returneth to his vomit.” Our black pup, sole passenger in the stern, perhaps made seasick, vomited, then cleaned the boat again most faithfully and with a bright eye, licking his chops and looking round for more.

We comment on the boats of different patterns, – dories (?), punts, bread-troughs, flatirons, etc., etc., — which we pass, the prevailing our genuine dead-river boats, not to be matched by Boston carpenters. One farmer blacksmith whom we know, whose boat we pass in Sudbury, has got a horseshoe nailed about the sculling-hole; — keeps off the witches too? 

The water carriages of various patterns and in various conditions, — some for pleasure (against the gentleman's seat?); some for ducking, small and portable; some for honest fishing, broad and leaky but not cranky; some with spearing fixtures; some stout and square-endish for hay boats; one canal-boat or mud-scow in the weeds, not worth getting down the stream, like some vast pike that could swallow all the rest, proper craft for our river.

In some places in the meadows opposite Bound Rock, the river seemed to have come to an end, it was so narrow suddenly.

After getting in sight of Sherman's Bridge, counted nineteen birches on the right-hand shore in one whirl.

Now commenced the remarkable meandering of the river, so that we seemed for some time to be now running up, then running down parallel with a long, low hill, tacking over the meadow in spite of ourselves.

Landed at Sherman's Bridge.

An apple tree, made scrubby by being browsed by cows. Through what early hardships it may attain to bear a sweet fruit! No wonder it is prompted to grow thorns at last, to defend itself from such foes.?

The pup nibbles clams, or plays with a bone no matter how dry.

Thus the dog can be taken on a river voyage, but the cat cannot. She is too set in her ways.

Now again for the Great Meadows.

What meandering! The Serpentine, our river should be called. What makes the river love to delay here? Here come to study the law of meandering.

We see the vast meadow studded with haycocks. We suspect that we have got to visit them all. It proves even so. Now we run down one haycock, now another.

The distance made is frequently not more than a third the distance gone. Between Sherman's Bridge and Causeway Bridge is about a mile and three quarters in a straight line, but we judged that we went more than three miles.

Here the pipes (at first) line the shore, and muskrat-houses still.

A duck (a loon ?) sails within gunshot, unwilling to fly; also a stake-driver (Ardea minor) rises with prominent breast or throat bone, as if badly loaded, his ship.

Now no button-bushes line the stream, the changeable (?) stream; no rocks exist; the shores are lined with, first, in the water, still green polygonum, then wide fields of dead pontederia, then great bulrushes, then various reeds, sedges, or tall grasses, also dead thalictrum (?), — or is it cicuta? 

Just this side the causeway bridges a field, like a tall corn-field, of tall rustling reeds (?), ten feet high with broadish leaves and large, now seedy tufts, standing amid the button-bushes and great bulrushes.

I remember to have seen none elsewhere in this vicinity, unless at Fresh Pond, and there are they not straighter? Also, just beyond the bridges, very tall flags from six to eight feet high, leaves like the cat-tail but no tail. What are they ?? 

We pass under two bridges above the Causeway Bridge. After passing under the first one of these two, at the mouth of Larnum Brook, which is fed from Blandford's Pond, comes from Marlborough through Mill Village, and has a branch, Hop Brook, from south of Nobscot, — we see Nobscot, very handsome in a purplish atmosphere in the west, over a very deep meadow, which makes far up.

A good way to skate to Nobscot, or within a mile or two.

To see a distant hill from the surface of water over a low and very broad meadow, much better than to see it from another hill. This perhaps the most novel and so memorable prospect we got.

Walked across half a mile to Pelham's Pond, whose waves were dashing quite grandly. A house near, with two grand elms in front.
I have seen other elms in Wayland.

This pond a good point to skate to in winter, when it is easily accessible. Now we should have to draw our boat.

On the return, as in going, we expended nearly as much time and labor in counteracting the boat's tendency to whirl round, it is so miserably built. Now and then, — aye, aye, almost an everlasting now, — it will take the bits in its mouth and go round in spite of us, though we row on one side only, for the wind fills the after part of the boat, which is nearly out of water, and we therefore get along best and fastest when the wind is strong and dead ahead.

That's the kind of wind we advertise to race in.

To row a boat thus all the day, with an hour's intermission, making fishes of ourselves as it were, putting on these long fins, realizing the finny life! Surely oars and paddles are but the fins which a man may use.

The very pads stand perpendicular (on their edges) before this wind, — which appears to have worked more to the north, — showing their red undersides.

The muskrats have exposed the clamshells to us in heaps all along the shore; else most would not know that a clam existed. If it were not for muskrats, how little would the fisherman see or know of fresh-water clamshells or clams! 

In the Great Meadows again the loon (?) rises, and again alights, and a heron (?) too flies sluggishly away, with vast wings, and small ducks which seem to have no tails, but their wings set quite aft.

The crows ashore are making an ado, perchance about some carrion.

We taste some swamp white oak acorns at the south end of Bound Rock Meadow.

The sun sets when we are off Israel Rice's. A few golden coppery clouds, intensely glowing, like fishes in some molten metal of the sky, and then the small scattered clouds grow blue-black above, or one half, and reddish or pink the other half, and after a short twilight the night sets in.

We think it is pleasantest to be on the water at this hour.

We row across Fair Haven in the thickening twilight and far below it, steadily and with out speaking. As the night draws on her veil, the shores retreat; we only keep in the middle of this low stream of light; we know not whether we float in the air or in the lower regions.

We seem to recede from the trees on shore or the island very slowly, and yet a few reaches make all our voyage. Nature has divided it agreeably into reaches.

The reflections of the stars in the water are dim and elongated like the zodiacal light straight down into the depths, but no mist rises to-night.

It is pleasant not to get home till after dark, — to steer by the lights of the villagers. The lamps in the houses twinkle now like stars; they shine doubly bright.

Rowed about twenty-four miles, going and coming. In a straight line it would be fifteen and one half.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 15, 1851

Up the river in a boat to Pelham's Pond . . .Rowed about twenty-four miles, going and coming. In a straight line it would be fifteen and one half. See September 14, 1854 ("To opposite Pelham’s Pond by boat. . . We went up thirteen or fourteen miles at least."); January 31, 1855 ("Skated up the river to explore further than I had been. I skated up as far as the boundary between Wayland and Sudbury just above Pelham’s Pond, about twelve miles,. . .and walked three quarters of a mile further. It was, all the way that I skated, a chain of meadows, with the muskrat-houses still rising above the ice. I skated past three bridges above Sherman’s —or nine in all—and walked to the fourth. "); July 31, 1859 ("This sixteen miles up, added to eleven down, makes about twenty-seven that I have boated on this river, to which may be added five or six miles of the Assabet."); December 28, 1859 ("It is remarkable that the river should so suddenly contract at Pelham Pond. It begins to be Musketaquid there.")

Walked across half a mile to Pelham's Pond. See July 31, 1859 ("We could not now detect any passage into Pelham Pond, which at the nearest, near the head of this reach, came within thirty rods of the river")

,

This is earlier than I ever knew it to open.

March 11.

C. says that Walden is almost entirely open to-day, so that the lines on my map would not strike any ice, but that there is ice in the deep cove.

It will be open then the 12th or 13th.

This is earlier than I ever knew it to open.

Fair Haven was solid ice two or three days ago, and probably is still, and Goose Pond is to - day all ice.

Why, then, should Walden have broken up thus early? for it froze over early and the winter was steadily cold up to February at least.

I think it must have been because the ice was uncommonly covered with snow, just as the earth was, and as there was little or no frost in the earth, the ice also was thin, and it did not increase upward with snow ice as much as usual because there was no thaw or rain at all till February 2d, and then very little.

According to all accounts there has been no skating on Walden the past winter on account of the snow. It was unusually covered with snow.

This shows how many things are to be taken into account in judging of such a pond.

I have not been able to go to the pond the past winter.

I infer that, if it has broken up thus early, it must be because the ice was thin, and that it was thin not for want of cold generally, but because of the abundance of snow which lay on it.

The water is now high on the meadows and there is no ice there, owing to the recent heavy rains.

Yet C. thinks it has been higher a few weeks since.

C. observes where mice (?) have gnawed the pitch pines the past winter. Is not this a phenomenon of a winter of deep snow only? as that when I lived at Walden, a hard winter for them. I do not commonly observe it on a large scale.

My Aunt Sophia, now in her eightieth year, says that when she was a little girl my grandmother, who lived in Keene, N. H., eighty miles from Boston, went to Nova Scotia, and, in spite of all she could do, her dog Bob, a little black dog with his tail cut off, followed her to Boston, where she went aboard a vessel.

Directly after, however, Bob returned to Keene. 

One day, Bob, lying as usual under his mistress's bed in Keene, the window being open, heard a dog bark in the street, and instantly, forgetting that he was in the second story, he sprang up and jumped out the chamber window. He came down squarely on all fours, but it surprised or shocked him so that he did not run an inch, --- which greatly amused the children, - my mother and aunts.



The seed of the willow is exceedingly minute, - as I measure, from one twentieth to one twelfth of an inch in length by one fourth as much in width, - and is surrounded at base by a tuft of cotton - like hairs about one fourth of an inch long rising around and above it, forming a kind of parachute. These render it the most buoyant of the seeds of any of our trees, and it is borne the furthest horizontally with the least wind.

It falls very slowly even in the still air of a chamber, and rapidly ascends over a stove. It floats the most like a mote of any, — in a meandering manner, — and, being enveloped in this tuft of cotton, the seed is hard to detect.

Each of the numerous little pods, more or less ovate and beaked, which form the fertile catkin is closely packed with down and seeds. At maturity these pods open their beaks, which curve back, and gradually discharge their burden like the milkweed. It would take a delicate gin indeed to separate these seeds from their cotton.

If you lay bare any spot in our woods, however sandy, as by a railroad cut, no shrub or tree is surer to plant itself there sooner or later than a willow (commonly S. humilis or tristis) or poplar.

We have many kinds, but each is confined to its own habitat. I am not aware that the S. nigra has ever strayed from the river's brink. Though many of the S. alba have been set along our causeways, very few have sprung up and maintained their ground elsewhere.

The principal habitat of most of our species, such as love the water, is the river's bank and the adjacent river meadows, and when certain kinds spring up in an inland meadow where they were not known before, I feel pretty certain that they come from the river meadows.

I have but little doubt that the seed of four of those that grow along the railroad causeway was blown from the river meadows, viz. S. pedicellaris, lucida, Torreyana, and petiolaris.

The barren and fertile flowers are usually on separate plants. I observe [?] that the greater part of the white willows set out on our causeways are sterile ones.

You can easily distinguish the fertile ones at a distance when the pods are bursting.

And it is said that no sterile weeping willows have been introduced into this country, so that it cannot be raised from the seed.

Of two of the indigenous willows common along the brink of our river I have detected but one sex.

The seeds of the willow thus annually fill the air with their lint, being wafted to all parts of the country, and, though apparently not more than one in many millions gets to be a shrub, yet so lavish and persevering is Nature that her purpose is completely answered.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 11, 1861

It will be open then the 12th or 13th.This is earlier than I ever knew it to open. See Walden ("In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in '46, the 25th of March; in '47, the 8th of April; in '51, the 28th of March; in '52, the 18th of April; in '53, the 23rd of March; in '54, about the 7th of April. "); April 18, 1856 ("Walden is open entirely to-day for the first time, owing to the rain of yesterday and evening. I have observed its breaking up of different years commencing in ’45, and the average date has been April 4th. ") NoeFrom 1995 to 2015, ice out ranged from Jan. 29 in the record-breaking warm winter of 2012 to as late as April 12. The median ice out date over that period was March 21.  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Ice-out

C. observes where mice (?) have gnawed the pitch pines the past winter. See January 23, 1852 ("Mice have nibbled the buds of the pitch pines, where the plumes have been bent down by the snow."); April 8, 1861 ("The pitch pines have been much gnawed or barked this snowy winter . . . At the base of each, also, is a quantity of the mice droppings. It is probably the white-footed mouse. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Mouse

   

We have many kinds, but each is confined to its own habitat. See May 12, 1857 ("Consider how many species of willow have been planted along the railroad causeway within ten years, of which no one knows the history, and not one in Concord beside myself can tell the name of one,")

The seed of the willow is exceedingly minute. . .and is surrounded at base by a tuft of cotton - like hairs about one fourth of an inch long rising around and above it, forming a kind of parachute. These render it the most buoyant of the seeds of any of our trees . . and, though apparently not more than one in many millions gets to be a shrub, yet so lavish and persevering is Nature that her purpose is completely answered. See October 12, 1851 ("The seeds of the bidens, or beggar-ticks, with four-barbed awns like hay-hooks, now adhere to your clothes, so that you are all bristling with them. ... How tenacious of its purpose to spread and plant its race! By all methods nature secures this end, whether by the balloon, or parachute, or hook, or barbed spear like this, or mere lightness which the winds can waft."); November 8, 1860 ("Consider how persevering Nature is, and how much time she has to work in, though she works slowly.") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Propogation of the Willow. and  A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau. Willows on the Causeway.

One would like to skim over it like a hawk

January 4.

To Fair Haven on the ice partially covered with snow.

The cracks in the ice showing a white cleavage. 

What is their law?

Somewhat like foliage, but too rectangular, like the characters of some Oriental language. I feel as if I could get grammar and dictionary and go into it. They are of the form which a thin flake of ice takes in melting, somewhat rectangular with an irregular edge.

The pond is covered, — dappled or sprinkled, more than half covered, with flat drifts or patches of snow which has lodged, of graceful curving outlines. One would like to skim over it like a hawk, and detect their law.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 4, 1852

Patches of snow of graceful curving outlines. See February 12, 1860 ("The sky-blue, sky-reflecting ice with patches of snow scattered over it like mackerel clouds.")

A meadow and an island.

In all my rambles I have seen no landscape which can make me forget Fair Haven. I still sit on its Cliff in a new spring day, and look over the awakening woods and the river, and hear the new birds sing, with the same delight as ever. It is as sweet a mystery to me as ever, what this world is. Fair Haven Lake in the south, with its pine-covered island and its meadows, the hickories putting out fresh young yellowish leaves, and the oaks light-grayish ones, while the oven-bird thrums his sawyer-like strain, and the chewink rustles through the dry leaves or repeats his jingle on a tree-top, and the wood thrush, the genius of the wood, whistles for the first time his clear and thrilling strain, - it sounds as it did the first time I heard it. The sight of these budding woods intoxicates me, — this diet drink.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May, 1850


In all my rambles I have seen no landscape which can make me forget Fair Haven. See November 21, 1850 ("I see Fair Haven Pond with its island, and meadow between the island and the shore, and a strip of perfectly still and smooth water in the lee of the island, and two hawks, fish hawks perhaps, sailing over it. I do not see how it could be improved. Yet I do not see what these things can be."); February 14, 1851 ("One afternoon in the fall, November 21st, I saw Fair Haven Pond with its island and meadow; between the island and the shore, a strip of perfectly smooth water in the lee of the island; and two hawks sailing over it; and something more I saw which cannot easily be described . . .") April 14, 1852 ("Fair Haven Pond -- the pond, the meadow beyond the button-bush and willow curve, the island, and the meadow between the island and mainland with its own defining lines -- are all parted off like the parts of a mirror. A fish hawk is calmly sailing over all . . . "); May 17, 1853 ("I was surprised, on turning round, to behold the serene and everlasting beauty of the world.”)May 22, 1854 ("How many times I have been surprised thus, on turning about on this very spot, at the fairness of the earth!”); October 7, 1857 ("When I turn round half-way up Fair Haven Hill, by the orchard wall, and look northwest, I am surprised for the thousandth time at the beauty of the landscape, and I sit down to behold it at my leisure. I think that Concord affords no better view.");  March 18, 1858 ("When I get two thirds up the hill, I look round and am for the hundredth time surprised by the landscape of the river valley and the horizon with its distant blue scalloped rim. “) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Fair Haven Pond

Though the frost is nearly out of the ground, the winter has not broken up in me

March 30. 

March 30, 2013

Dug some parsnips this morning. They break off about ten inches from the surface, the ground being frozen there.

The Cliffs remind me of that narrow place in the brook where two meadows nearly meet, with floating grass, though the water is deeper there under the bank than anywhere. So the Cliffs are a place where two summers nearly meet. 

Put up a bluebird-box, and found a whole egg in it. Saw a pewee from the rail road causeway. 

Having occasion to-day to put up a long ladder against the house, I found, from the trembling of my nerves with the exertion, that I had not exercised that part of my system this winter  How much I may have lost! It would do me good to go forth and work hard and sweat. Though the frost is nearly out of the ground, the winter has not broken up in me. It is a backward season with me. 

Perhaps we grow older and older till we no longer sympathize with the revolution of the seasons, and our winters never break up. 

To-day, as frequently for some time past, we have a raw east wind, which is rare in winter. 

I see as yet very little, perhaps no, new growth in the plants in open fields, but only the green radical leaves which have been kept fresh under the snow; but if I should explore carefully about their roots, I should find some expanding buds and even new-rising shoots. 

The farmers are making haste to clear up their wood-lots, which they have cut off the past winter, to get off the tops and brush, that they may not be too late and injure the young sprouts and lose a year's growth in the operation, also that they may be ready for their spring work.

From the Cliffs I see that Fair Haven Pond is open over the channel of the river, — which is in fact thus only revealed, of the same width as elsewhere, running from the end of Baker' s Wood to the point of the Island. The slight current there has worn away the ice. I never knew before exactly where the channel was. It is pretty central. 

I perceive the hollow sound from the rocky ground as I tread and stamp about the Cliffs, and am reminded how much more sure children are to notice this peculiarity than grown persons. I remember when I used to make this a regular part of the entertainment when I conducted a stranger to the Cliffs. 

On the warm slope of the Cliffs the radical (?) leaves of the St. John's- wort (somewhat spurge-like), small on slender sprigs, have been evergreen under the snow. In this warm locality there is some recent growth nearest the ground. 

The leaves of the Saxifraga vernalis on the most mossy rocks are quite fresh. 

That large evergreen leaf sometimes mistaken for the mayflower is the Pyrola rotundifolia and perhaps some other species. 

What are those leaves in rounded beds, curled and hoary beneath, reddish-rown above, looking as if covered with frost? It is now budded, - a white, downy bud. [The Gnaphalium plantaginifolium and G. purpureum.]


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 30, 1852

Perhaps we grow older and older till we no longer sympathize with the revolution of the seasons, and our winters never break up. See March 31, 1852 ("Perchance as we grow old we cease to spring with the spring, and we are indifferent to the succession of years, and they go by without epoch as months"); August 23, 1853 ("Perhaps after middle age man ceases to be interested in the morning and in the spring.”)

Though the frost is nearly out of the ground, the winter has not broken up in me. See March 9, 1852 (" When the frost comes out of the ground, there is a corresponding thawing of the man.”); March 21, 1853 ("Winter breaks up within us; the frost is coming out of me, and I am heaved like the road; accumulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels.")

I see that Fair Haven Pond is open over the channel of the river. See March 30, 1856 ("I walk over the pond and down on the middle of the river to the bridge, without seeing an opening."); March 26, 1860 ("Fair Haven Pond may be open by the 20th of March, as this year, or not till April 13 as in '56, or twenty-three days later.”)  See Also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Ice-out


On the warm slope of the Cliffs the radical leaves of the St. John's- wort  have been evergreen under the snow. See January 9, 1855 ("How pretty the evergreen radical shoots of the St. John’s-wort now exposed, partly red or lake, various species of it.. . .A little wreath of green and red lying along on the muddy ground amid the melting snows.")

The leaves of the Saxifraga vernalis on the most mossy rocks are quite fresh. See March 30, 1856 ("[I]n this warm recess at the head of the meadow, though the rest of the meadow is covered with snow a foot or more in depth, I am surprised to see . . . the golden saxifrage, green and abundant")

The phenomena of an average March

March 22. 

Colder yet, and a whitening of snow, some of it in the form of pellets, — like my pellet frost! - but melts about as fast as it falls. 

At 4 P. M., 28; probably about 30 at 2 P. M.

Fair Haven Pond was seen entirely open the 20th. ( I saw it the 15th, and thought it would open in four or five days; the channel was not then open.) Say, then, 20th. Channel open, say 17th. 

The phenomena of an average March are increasing warmth, melting the snow and ice and, gradually, the frost in the ground; cold and blustering weather, with high, commonly northwest winds for many days together; misty and other rains taking out frost, and whitenings of snow, and winter often back again, both its cold and snow; bare ground and open waters, and more or less of a freshet; some calm and pleasant days reminding us of summer, with a blue haze or a thicker mist wreathing the woods at last, in which, perchance, we take off our coats awhile and sit without a fire a day; ways getting settled, and some greenness appearing on south bank; April-like rains, after the frost is chiefly out; plowing and planting of peas, etc., just beginning, and the old leaves getting dry in the woods. 

Vegetation fairly begins, – conferva and mosses, grass and carex, etc., — and gradually many early herbaceous plants start, and noticed radical leaves; Stellaria media and shepherd's-purse bloom; maple and buttonwood sap (6th) flow; spiræas start, cladonias flush, and bæomyces handsome; willow catkins become silvery, aspens downy; osiers, etc., look bright, white maple and elm buds expand and open, oak woods thin- leaved; alder and hazel catkins become relaxed and elongated. 

First perceptible greenness on south banks, 22d. The skunk-cabbage begins to bloom (23d) ; plant peas , etc., 26th; spring rye, wheat, lettuce; maple swamps red-tinged (?) 28th, and lake grass; and perchance the gooseberry and lilac begin to show a little green. That is, one indigenous native flower blooms. (Vide if the early sedge does.) 

About twenty-nine migratory birds arrive (including hawks and crows), and two or three more utter their spring notes and sounds, as nuthatch and chickadee, turkeys, and woodpecker tapping, while apparently the snow bunting, lesser redpoll, shrike, and doubtless several more — as owls, crossbills (?) — leave us, and woodcocks and hawks begin to lay. 

Many insects and worms come forth and are active,- and the perla insects still about ice and water, — as tipula, grubs, and fuzzy caterpillars, minute hoppers on grass at springs; gnats, large and small, dance in air; the common and the green fly buzz outdoors; the gyrinus, large and small, on brooks, etc., and skaters; spiders shoot their webs, and at last gossamer floats; the honey bee visits the skunk- cabbage; fishworms come up, sow-bugs, wireworms  etc.; various larvæ are seen in pools; small green and also brown grasshoppers begin to hop, small ants to stir (25th); Vanessa Antiopa out 29th; cicindelas run on sand; and small reddish butter flies are seen in wood-paths, etc., etc., etc. 

Skunks are active and frolic; woodchucks and ground squirrels come forth; moles root; musquash are commonly drowned out and shot , and sometimes erect a new house, and at length are smelled; and foxes have young (?). 

As for fishes, etc., trout glance in the brooks , brook minnows are seen; see furrows on sandy bottoms, and small shell snails copulate; dead suckers, etc. , are seen floating on meadows; pickerel and perch are running up brooks, and suckers (24th) and pickerel begin to dart in shallows. 

And for reptiles, not only salamanders and pollywogs are more commonly seen, and also those little frogs (sylvatica males ?) at spring-holes and ditches, the yellow-spot turtle and wood turtle, Rana fontinalis, and painted tortoise come forth, and the Rana sylvatica croaks.

Our river opened in 1851, much before February 25; 1852, March 14 at least; 1853, say March 8 at least; 1854, say March 9; average March 5. 

Hudson River opened, according to Patent Office Reports, 1854, page 435: 1851, February 25; 1852, March 28 ; 1853 , March 23; 1854, March 17; average March 16. According to which our river opens some eleven days the soonest. Perhaps this is owing partly to the fact that our river is nearer the ocean and that it rises southward instead of northward.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 22, 1860

Colder yet, and a whitening of snow, some of it in the form of pellets, — like my pellet frost! - but melts about as fast as it falls. See December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. . . . there is the pellet or shot snow, which consists of little dry spherical pellets the size of robin-shot")

Fair Haven Pond was seen entirely open the 20th. Channel open, say 17th. See  March 26, 1860 ("See Fair Haven Pond may be open by the 20th of March, as this year [1860], or not till April 13 as in '56, or twenty-three days later."); March 20, 1858 ("Fair Haven is still closed."); March 21, 1859 (" Fair Haven Pond is only two thirds open. "); March 22, 1854 ("Fair Haven still covered and frozen anew in part. "); March 22, 1855 ("I cross Fair Haven Pond, including the river, on the ice, and probably can for three or four days yet.");  March 30, 1852 ("From the Cliffs I see that Fair Haven Pond is open over the channel of the river, - which is in fact thus only revealed, of the same width as elsewhere, running from the end of Baker's Wood to the point of the Island. The slight current there has worn away the ice. I never knew before exactly where the channel was . It is pretty central.")

 The perla insects still about ice and water,  See  March 17, 1858 ("As usual, I have seen for some weeks on the ice these peculiar (perla?) insects with long wings and two tails.");   March 22, 1856 (" On water standing above the ice under a white maple, are many of those Perla (?) insects, with four wings, drowned, though it is all ice and snow around the country over. Do not see any flying, nor before this);  March 24, 1857 ("I see many of those narrow four-winged insects (perla?) of the ice now fluttering on the water like ephemerae. They have two pairs of wings indistinctly spotted dark and light..")

The phenomena of an average March. See March 22, 1853 ("I have an appointment with spring. She comes to the window to wake me") See also Walden (Spring)("I am on the alert for the first signs of spring ") and A Book of the Seasons by Henry Thoreau, Earliest signs of spring, a working checklist

The last three have been true March days for wind.

March 4

Sunday. 2 P. M. – To Conantum via Clamshell. 

Thermometer 44; very strong and gusty northwest wind, with electric-looking wind-clouds. One spits a · little rain, but mostly clear. The frost is all out of the upper part of the garden. These wind-clouds come up and disappear fast, and have a more or less perpendicular fibre. 

Sit under Lupine Promontory again, to see the ripples. The wind is too strong, the waves run too high and incessantly, to allow the distinct puffs or gusts that drop from over the hill to be seen distinctly enough on tumultuous surface. Yet it is interesting. It spreads and runs as a bird spreads its tail suddenly, or it is as if a gust fell on a head of dark hair and made dimples or “crowns” in it, or it is as when dust before a brisk sweeper curls along over a floor. 

There is much less of that yellowish anchor ice than on the 2d. Cakes of it successively rise, being separated by warmth from the bottom, and are driven off to the leeward shore. In some places that shore is lined with such cakes now, which have risen and been blown clear across the meadow and river, — large masses. Some portions of them are singularly saturated, of a yellowish or clay-color, and an uneven upper surface, with a finely divided perpendicular grain, looking (in form) just like some kinds of fungi (that commonly yellowish kind). There strike against one another and make a pleasant musical, or tinkling, sound. 

Some of the ice will occasionally be lifted up on its edge two feet high and very conspicuous afar. 

That reddish-purple tinge in the meadow ripples appears to be owing to a reflection in some cases from the somewhat russet bottom. 

I see some curled dock, just started. 

The earth is never lighter - colored than now, — the hillsides reflecting the sun when first dried after the winter, — especially, methinks, where the sheep's fescue grows(?). It contrasts finely with the rich blue of the water. 

I saw half a dozen crows on a cake of ice in the middle of the Great Meadows yesterday, evidently looking for some favorite food which is washed on to it, - snails, or cranberries perhaps. 

I see a bush of the early willow — by wall far in front of the C. Miles house — whose catkins are conspicuous thirty rods off, very decidedly green, three eighths of an inch by measure. The bush at this distance had quite a silvery look, and the catkins show some redness within. Many of the scales as usual had fallen. 

A hen-hawk rises and sails away over the Holden Wood as in summer. Saw and heard one scream the 2d. 

I notice, where (ice or) snow has recently melted, a very thin dirty-white web like a dense cobweb, left flat on the grass, such as I saw some years ago. 

There is a broad and very black space extending through Fair Haven Pond over the channel, visible half a mile off, where the ice is thinnest and saturated with water. The channel is already open a little way at the upper end of the pond. This pond at its outlet contracts gradually into the river, so that you could hardly tell where the pond left off and the river began. I see that the ice at present extends that way only so far as I last year assumed that the pond did. In this sense the river hence to the Hubbard Bridge is pond-like compared with the portion below. 

See two apparently sternothærus eggs dropped in a slight hollow in the grass, evidently imperfectly planted by the turtle; still whole. 

The last three have been true March days for wind. 

The handsome and neat brown (pale-brown yet distinct on the lighter withered sod) of the lechea is now conspicuous as a shading in the drying fields.

See no ducks to-day, though much water. Nights too cold? 

Aspen down a quarter of an inch out.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 4, 1860

There is a broad and very black space extending through Fair Haven Pond over the channel, visible half a mile off, where the ice is thinnest and saturated with water. See March 30, 1852 (" From the Cliffs I see that Fair Haven Pond is open over the channel of the river, - which is in fact thus only revealed, of the same width as elsewhere, running from the end of Baker's Wood to the point of the Island. The slight current there has worn away the ice. I never knew before exactly where the channel was.") See also February 28, 1857 ("Nearly one third the channel is open in Fair Haven Pond. ");. March 26, 1860 ("Fair Haven Pond may be open by the 20th of March, as this year [1860], or not till April 13 as in '56, or twenty-three days later"); March 29, 1854 ("Fair Haven half open; channel wholly open. Thin cakes of ice at a distance now and then blown up on their edges glistening in the sun.").

I see a bush of the early willow . . . whose catkins are conspicuous thirty rods off, very decidedly green, three eighths of an inch by measure.  See February 19, 1857 ("Some willow catkins have crept a quarter of an inch from under their scales and look very red, probably on account of the warm weather"); See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Alder and Willow Catkins Expanding

I saw half a dozen crows on a cake of ice in the middle of the Great Meadows yesterday, evidently looking for some favorite food which is washed on to it, - snails, or cranberries perhaps. See March 22, 1854 ("See crows along the water's edge. What do they eat?"): March 22, 1855 (" I have noticed crows in the meadows ever since they were first partially bare, three weeks ago "); March 22, 1856 ("Many tracks of crows in snow along the edge of the open water against Merrick’s at Island. They thus visit the edge of water—this and brooks —before any ground is exposed. Is it for small shellfish?"); March 20, 1856 ("Perhaps these [Paludina decisa] make part of the food of the crows which visit this brook and whose tracks I now see on the edge, and have all winter. Probably they also pick up some dead frogs"); March 5, 1859 (" I see crows walking about on the ice half covered with snow in the middle of the meadows, where there is no grass, apparently to pick up the worms and other insects left there since the midwinter freshet ."). See also  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring:  The crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows

A hen-hawk rises and sails away over the Holden Wood as in summer. Saw and heard one scream the 2d. See March 15, 1856 ("Hear two hawks scream. There is something truly March-like in it, like a prolonged blast or whistling of the wind"); March 15, 1860 ("A hen-hawk sails away from the wood southward.  

  

These hawks, as usual, began to be common about the first of March, showing that they were returning from their winter quarters.").  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: the Hawks of March

 Aspen down a quarter of an inch out. See February 6, 1856 (" The down is just peeping out from some of the aspen buds"); February 27. 1852 ("The buds of the aspen show a part of their down or silky catkins.")

March 4. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, March 4

A hen-hawk rises 

and sails over Holden Wood 

as in the summer.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, True March days for wind. 

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 © 2009-2025

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