Jan. 21, 1855. 2.30 P.M. — The sky has gradually become overcast, and now it is just beginning to snow. Looking against a dark roof, I detect a single flake from time to time, but when I look at the dark side of the woods two miles off in the horizon, there already is seen a slight thickness or mistiness in the air. In this way, perhaps, may it first be detected.
P. M. To Andromeda Ponds via railroad; return by base of Cliffs.
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, and the latter form commonly a reddish-brown ground out of which the former rise. These colors are no longer in strong contrast with each other. ….
Saw in an old white pine stump, about fifteen inches from the ground, a hole pecked about an inch and a half in diameter. It was about six inches deep downward in the rotten stump and was bottomed with hypnum [moss], rabbit's fur, and hair, and a little dry grass. Was it a mouse-nest? or a nuthatch's, creeper's, or chickadee's nest? It has a slight musky smell.
-H.D.T.
Jan. 21, 2021.
At 11 a.m. it is 25 degrees under a gray sky with a heavy feeling of impending snow. I walk east over Bear Garden Hill and into the Concord Land Conservation Trust's Wright Woods, and then bear south parallel to the railroad bed. With my Thoreau to-find list, my mind is focussed on what I would overwise overlook; I find multitudes of decaying stumps in various, beautiful states of decline - some like rounded out uniform wooden bowls, others like oozing melting cakes covered in lichen and moss. Multi-colored and multi-textured, the stumps display shades of differently rotting wood, many almost iridescent green, covered with thick shag carpets like the brocade moss, hypnum imponens. One stump show signs of a tree's attempted regrowth in the form of slim, scraggly coppicing around its perimeter, while another stump hosts a full sampling growing out of the soil within its hollow center, as if were a garden pot. While I find many stumps hollowed out or with pecker holes for potential nests, and some evidence of animal activity like eaten, discarded acorn shells, I found no actively used cavities.
After rounding about the warm red Andromeda Ponds, I make my way to Fairhaven Cliffs. Upon my perch, I examine the treescape before me to the southeast and southwest over some pitch pines growing right out of the rocky ledge. The intermixed pines and oaks in the foreground show as green and ruddy brown, whereas in the background, possibly miles away, the pines are richer and darkened. The very distant hills look blue.
On my way home, the sweet relief of winter returns with a soft snowfall. It is amazing how much the very thin layer of snow left from the micro-storm changes the appearance of the landscape, which has been barren of snow for so long.
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