The wild apples are frozen as hard as stones, and rattle in my pockets.

December 19. 

December 19, 2021

Yesterday I tracked a partridge in the new- fallen snow, till I came to where she took to flight, and I could track her no further. 

I see where the snowbirds have picked the seeds of the Roman wormwood and other weeds and have covered the snow with the shells and husks. 

The smilax berries are as plump as ever. 

The catkins of the alders are as tender and fresh-looking as ripe mulberries. 

The dried choke-cherries so abundant in the swamp are now quite sweet. 

The witch-hazel is covered with fruit and drops over gracefully like a willow, the yellow foundation of its flowers still remaining. 

I find the sweet-gale (Myrica) by the river also. 

The wild apples are frozen as hard as stones, and rattle in my pockets, but I find that they soon thaw when I get to my chamber and yield a sweet cider. I am astonished that the animals make no more use of them.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 19, 1850

I find the sweet-gale (Myrica) by the river also. See December 14, 1850 ("I find a low, branching shrub frozen into the edge of the ice, with a fine spicy scent . . .. When I rub the dry-looking fruit in my hands, it feels greasy and stains them a permanent yellow, which I cannot wash out. It lasts several days, and my fingers smell medicinal. I conclude that it is sweetgale, and we name the island Myrica Island.")

The dried choke-cherries so abundant in the swamp are now quite sweet. Compare August 5, 1856 ("Choke-cherries near House-leek Rock begin to be ripe, though still red. 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.")

The wild apples are frozen as hard as stones, and rattle in my pockets. See November 11, 1853 ("Apples are frozen on the trees and rattle like stones in my pocket."); December 18, 1859 ("Apples are thawed now and are very good. Their juice is the best kind of bottled cider that I know. They are all good in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press.")

The pond is frozen about the edges.

December 18. 

December 18, 2018

P. M. — To Walden. 

The pond is merely frozen a little about the edges. I see various little fishes lurking under this thin, transparent ice, close up to the edge or shore, especially where the shore is flat and water shoal. 

They are little shiners with the dark longitudinal stripe, about an inch and a half long, perch, and one pickerel about a foot long. They are all a peculiar rich-brown color seen thus through the ice. They love to get up as close to the shore as possible, and when you walk along you scare them out. 

I cast a stone on the ice over a perch six inches long, thinking only to stun it, but killed it so. 

The ice is about one inch thick. I notice that it is firmly frozen to the shore, so that there is no rise and fall as when it was water, or at least nothing equal to that, but the ice has been cracked with a great many parallel cracks six inches to a foot from the shore. Yet apparently no water has oozed out there. 

Minott tells how he used to love to walk through swamps where great white pines grew and hear the wind sough in their tops. He recalls this now as he crouches over his stove, but he adds that it was dangerous, for even a small dead limb broken off by the wind and falling from such a height would kill a man at once.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 18, 1858

This thin, transparent ice, close up to the edge or shore. See December 19, 1856 ("The ice is now from two and a half to three inches thick, a transparent green ice, through which I see the bottom.")

I cast a stone on the ice over a perch six inches long, thinking only to stun it. See December 2, 1857 ("I observed two painted tortoises moving about under the thin transparent ice. When I broke it with my fist over each in succession, it was stunned by the blow.")

Minott tells how he used to love to walk through swamps where great white pines grew and hear the wind sough in their tops He recalls this now as he crouches over his stove. See October 4, 1851 ("He loves to walk in a swamp in windy weather and hear the wind groan through the pines."); February 29, 1856 ("I willingly listen to the stories he has told me half a dozen times already.“); February 20, 1857 ("Minott always sits in the corner behind the door, close to the stove, with commonly the cat by his side. See also April 3, 1854 ("This is methinks the first hazy day, and the sough of the wind in the pines sounds warmer, whispering of summer.")

Where a partridge took to wing.

December 18. 

P. M. —Down railroad via Andromeda Ponds to river.

Snowed a little finely last night and this forenoon. I see a few squirrels’ tracks in the woods and, here and there in one or two places, where a mouse’s gallery approached the surface. The powdery surface is broken by it. 

I am surprised to find in the Andromeda Ponds, especially the westernmost one, north side, an abundance of decodon, or swamp loosestrife. 

Where a partridge took to wing I find the round red buds of the high blueberry plucked about the swamps.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 18, 1854

Where a partridge took to wing I find the round red buds of the high blueberry plucked about the swamps. See February 24, 1854 ("Observe in one of the little pond-holes between Walden and Fair Haven where a partridge had travelled around in the snow . . . and had paused at each high blueberry bush, fed on its red buds and shaken down fragments of its bark on the snow.”) See also November 6, 1853 (“The remarkable roundish, plump red buds of the high blueberry.”) and note to January 12, 1855 (“Well may the tender buds attract us at this season, no less than partridges, for they are the hope of the year, the spring rolled up. The summer is all packed in them.”)

The morning light

December 16. 

Friday. 

December 16, 2022

The elms covered with hoar frost, seen in the east against the morning light, are very beautiful. 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. 

Would you be well, see that you are attuned to each mood of nature. 

J. E. Cabot says the lunxus is a wolverene. 

Some creature has killed ten, at least, of H. Wheeler's doves and left them together in the dove-house. I think it was my short-eared owl, which flew thither.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 16, 1853

The elms covered with hoar frost, seen in the east against the morning light. See December 16, 1837 ("The woods were this morning covered with thin bars of vapor"); December 16, 1855 ("The mist makes the near trees dark and noticeable, like pictures, and makes the houses more interesting, revealing but one at a time.") See also December 26, 1855 ("Trees seen in the West against the dark cloud, the sun shining on them, are perfectly white as frostwork, and their outlines very perfectly and distinctly revealed, with recurved twigs.")

Would you be well, see that you are attuned to each mood of nature. See June 22, 1851 (“My pulse must beat with Nature”); August 23, 1853 ("Nature" is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health."); July 14, 1854 ("Health is a sound relation to nature.”); November 18, 1857 (“Sympathy with nature is an evidence of perfect health. You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind”);  January 23, 1858 (“To insure health, a man’s relation to Nature must come very near to a personal one”). See also Walden (" Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.")

I think it was my short-eared owl. See December 8, 1853 ("At midday (3 p. m.) see an owl fly from toward the river and alight on Mrs. Richardson's front-yard fence . . .I am inclined to think it the short-eared owl, though I could see no ears ")

December 16. See A Book of the Seasons, By Henry Thoreau, December 16 

Would you be well

see that you are attuned to

each mood of nature.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The morning light

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

tinyurl.com/hdt531216

A puff of air, a flash in the pan, a smoke, a nothing?

December 15. 

Saw a small flock of geese go over.

December 15, 2018

One's life, the enterprise he is here upon, should certainly be a grand fact to consider, not a mean or insignificant one. A man should not live without a purpose, and that purpose must surely be a grand one. 

But is this fact of "our life" commonly but a puff of air, a flash in the pan, a smoke, a nothing? It does not afford arena for a tragedy.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 15, 1852

 Saw a small flock of geese go over. See December 1, 1857 ("I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.”); December 6, 1855 ("10 P. M. — Hear geese going over.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Geese in Autumn

A man should not live without a purpose. See December 29, 1841("That one may work out a true life requires more art and delicate skill than any other work."); April 29, 1852 (“The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.”); Walden ("To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”) and ("And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. . . .Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, . . .— determined to make a day of it.”); October 18, 1855 (“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”); November 18, 1857 "Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of . . .”); August 30, 1856 (“Many of our days should be spent, not in vain expectations and lying on our oars, but in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him. Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry that you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy ”); September 8, 1858 ("It is good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else.”)

But is this fact of "our life " commonly but a puff of air, a flash in the pan, a smoke, a nothing? See August 8, 1852 ("When the play - it may be the tragedy of life - is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.")

A barred owl, representative of the night

December 14 

I see at Derby’s shop a barred owl (Strix nebulosa), taken in the woods west of the factory on the 11th, found (with its wing broke) by a wood chopper. 

It measures about three and a half feet in alar extent by eighteen to twenty inches long, or nearly the same as the cat owl, but is small and without horns. It is very mild and quiet, bears handling perfectly well, and only snaps its bill with a loud sound at the sight of a cat or dog. 

It is apparently a female, since it is large and has white spots on the wings. The claws are quite dark rather than dark horn-color. 

It hopped into the basin of the scales, and I was surprised to find that it weighed only one pound and one ounce. It may be thin-fleshed on account of its broken wing, but how light-bodied these fliers are! 

It has no yellow iris like the cat owl, and has the bristles about its yellow bill which the other has not. It has a very smooth and handsome round head, a brownish gray. 

Solemnity is what they express, — fit representatives of the night.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 14, 1858


A barred owl (Strix nebulosa). See December 9, 1856 (“Every week almost I hear the loud voice of the hooting owl, though I do not see the bird more than once in ten years.”); January 7, 1854 ("Strange that we should hear this sound so often, loud and far, — a voice which we call the owl, — and yet so rarely see the bird.”); Walden, Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors ("One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl (Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white-pine . . . when he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them."); See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Voice of the Barred Owl

The injured barred owl

snaps its bill with a loud sound

weighs only one pound.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, A barred owl

 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 © 2009-2026

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-581214

These trees hanging still with leather-colored leaves in this mizzling rain, seen against the misty sky.

December 13. 

P. M. — To Walden. 

There is a fine mizzling rain, which rests in small drops on your coat, but on most surfaces is turning to a glaze. 

Yet it is not cold enough for gloves even, and I think that the freezing may be owing to the fineness of the rain, and that, if it should rain much harder, even though it were colder, it would not freeze to what it fell on. It freezes on the railroad rails when it does not on the wooden sleepers. 

Already I begin to see, on the storm side of every twig and culm, a white glaze (reflecting the snow or sky), rhyming with the vegetable core. And on those fine grass heads which are bent over in the path the fine dew-like drops are frozen separately like a string of beads, being not yet run together. 

There is little if any wind, and the fine rain is visible only against a dark ground. 

There is not so much ice in Walden as on the 11th. 

A damp day brings out the color of oak leaves, somewhat as of lichens. They are of a brighter and deeper leather-color, richer and more wholesome, hanging more straightly down than ever. They look peculiarly clean and wholesome, their tints brought out and their lobes more flattened out, and they show to great advantage, these trees hanging still with leather-colored leaves in this mizzling rain, seen against the misty sky. They are again as it were full-veined with some kind of brown sap.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 13, 1858
                 
And on those fine grass heads which are bent over in the path the fine dew-like drops are frozen separately like a string of beads. See December 15, 1855 ("The low grass and weeds, bent down with a myriad little crystalline drops, ready to be frozen .”)

There is not so much ice in Walden as on the 11th. See December 11, 1858 ("Walden is about one-third skimmed over."); December 18, 1858 ("The pond is merely frozen a little about the edges. I see various little fishes lurking under this thin, transparent ice, close up to the edge or shore, especially where the shore is flat and water shoal."); December 20, 1858 ("Walden is frozen over, except two small spots, less than half an acre in all, in middle."); December 24, 1858 ("Those two places in middle of Walden not frozen over yet, though it was quite cold last night!"); December 25, 1858 (" Walden at length skimmed over last night, i. e. the two holes that remained open. One was very near the middle and deepest part, the other between that and the railroad.") See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, First Ice.

A damp day brings out the color of oak leaves. See December 18, 1859 (“The withered oak leaves, being thoroughly saturated with moisture, are of a livelier color.”) See also December 1, 1856 (“The dear wholesome color of shrub oak leaves, so clean and firm,. . .Well-tanned leather on the one side, sun-tanned, color of colors, color of the cow and the deer, silver-downy beneath. ”);  December 13, 1856 (“A fine healthy and handsome scarlet oak . . .The leaves have a little redness in them.”); December 21, 1856 (“The red oak leaves are a little lighter brown than the black oak, less yellowish beneath.”);December 31, 1854 ("The white oak leaves are a cinnamon-color, the black and red oak leaves a reddish brown or leather-color.’); January 2, 1859 (“The color of young oaks of different species is still distinct, but more faded and blended, becoming a more uniform brown”)

Leather-colored leaves

seen against the misty sky

in this mizzling rain.