4 April 1859 – 10 April 1859

Friday. I believe that I rarely hear the nuthatch’s note from the elms toward evening, for when I heard it yesterday evening I was surprised. P. M. — To epigza and Well Meadow. Tsee on the west side of the railroad causeway a peculiar early willow, now just beginning to bloom with the common Salix discolor there, perhaps (as I remember) some thirty rods beyond the wall, against A. Wheeler’s land. The catkins (sterile) are pecul- iarly long and tapering, and grayish or mouse- color, beginning to open low on one side, while the points have comparatively little down on them. I find no description of it. Perhaps rather more than ata one inch long. -. The most deid- “= edly opening first on one side near the base of any. Call it the gray bodkin-pointed.

An easterly wind and rain. P. M. — To White Pond. C. says he saw a striped snake on the 30th. We go by Clamshell. The water on the meadows is now visibly lowered considerably, and the tops of bushes begin to appear. The high water has stood over and washed down the base of that avalanche of sand from my new ravine, leaving an upright edge a foot high, and as it subsided gradually, it has left various parallel shore- lines, with stones arranged more or less in rows along them, thus forming a regular beach of four or five rods’ length.

P. M.—To Goose Pond. The wind is as strong, and yet colder, being more from the north, than before. ‘Through, I think, all this windy weather, or at least for about three weeks, the wind has regularly gone down with the sun, strong as it has been each day. As we go up the hill in the woods east of Hubbard’s Close, I hear a singular sound through the roaring of the wind amid the trees, which I think at first some creature forty rods off, but it proves to be the creak- ing of one bough on another. When I knew what it was I was surprised to find it so near, even within a rod. It was occasioned by two little dead limbs, an inch or less in diameter, on two different white pines which stood four or five feet apart, — such limbs as are seen on every white pine below the living ones, some twelve feet from the ground. These with every motion of the trees in the wind were grating back and forth on each other, and had worn into one another, and this produced, not a mere coarse, grating sound, but a perfect viol sound, such as I never heard from trees before, —a jarring or vibratory creak, as if the bow leaped on the strings, for one limb was bow and the other string. It was on one key or note when the trees approached, and quite another and very fine and sharp when they receded. I raised one limb with a pole, and the music ceased. This was as musical as a viol, a forest viol, which might have suggested that instrument to some Orpheus wandering in the wood. He would only have to place a box of resonant wood beneath to complete a simple viol. We heard several others afterward which made a coarse, squeaking noise like a bird, but this would have suggested music to any one. It was mythologic, and an Indian might have referred it to a departed spirit. The fiddles made by the trees whose limbs cross one another, — played on by the wind! When we listened, in the wood, we heard all kinds of creaking and groaning sounds from the laboring trees. We go seeking the south sides of hills and woods, or deep hollows, to walk in this cold and blustering day. We sit by the side of Little Goose Pond, which C. calls Ripple Lake or Pool, to watch the ripples on it. Now it is nearly smooth, and then there drops down on to it, deep as it lies amid the hills, a sharp and nar- row blast of the icy north wind careering above, strik- ing it, perhaps, by a point or an edge, and swiftly spread- ing along it, making a dark-blue ripple. Now four or five windy bolts, sharp or blunt, strike it at once and spread different ways. The boisterous but playful north wind evidently stoops from a considerable height to dally with this fair pool which it discerns beneath. You could sit there and watch these blue shadows playing over the surface like the light and shade on changeable silk, for hours. It reminds me, too, of the swift Camilla on a field [of] grain. The wind often touches the water only by the finest points or edges. It is thus when you look in some measure from the sun, but if you move round so as to come more opposite to him, then all these dark-blue ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at, for you now see the sides of the wavelets which reflect the sun to you. A large fox-hole in Britton’s hollow, lately dug; an ox-cartload of sand, or more, thrown up on the hill- side. Watching the ripples fall and dash across the sur- face of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days. It is only on small lakes deep sunk in hollows in the woods that you can see or study them these days, for the winds sweep over the whole breadth of larger lakes incessantly, but they only touch these sheltered lake- lets by fine points and edges from time to time. And then there is such a fiddling in the woods, such a viol-creaking of bough on bough, that you would think music was being born again, as in the days of Orpheus. Orpheus and Apollo are certainly there tak- ing lessons; aye, and the jay and the blackbird, too, learn now where they stole their “thunder.” ‘They are perforce silent, meditating new strains. When the playful breeze drops on the pool, it springs to right and left, quick as a kitten playing with dead leaves, clapping her paw on them. Sometimes it merely raises a single wave at one point, as if a fish darted near the surface. While to you looking down from a hillside partly from the sun, these points and dashes look thus dark-blue, almost black, they are seen by another, standing low and more opposite to the sun, as the most brilliant sheeny and sparkling surface, too bright to look at. Thus water agitated by the wind is both far brighter and far darker than smooth water, seen from this side or that, — that is, as you look at the inclined surface of the wave which reflects the sun, or at the shaded side. For three weeks past, when I have looked northward toward the flooded meadows they have looked dark-blue or blackish, in proportion as the day was clear and the wind high from the north- west, making high waves and much shadow. We can sit in the deep hollows in the woods, like Frosty Hollow near Ripple Lake, for example, and find it quite still and warm in the sun, as if a different atmos- phere lurked there; but from time to time a cold puff from the rude Boreas careering overhead drops on us, and reminds us of the general character of the day. While we lie at length on the dry sedge, nourishing spring thoughts, looking for insects, and counting the rings on old stumps. These old gray or whitish stumps, with their porous structure where the ducts are seen, are very much like bones, — the bones of trees. I break a little cube out of this old oak stump, which was sawed off some thirty years ago, and which has about one hundred rings, —a piece sharply square-cornered and exactly the form of a square bunch of matches; and, the sawed end being regularly channelled by time in the direction of the ducts and of the silver grain, it looks precisely like the loose ends, or dipped end of the bunch, and would be mistaken for such on any shelf. Those ripple lakes lie now in the midst of mostly bare brown or tawny dry woodlands, themselves the most living objects. They may say to the first wood- land flowers, We played with the north winds here before ye were born.’