Category: weather

E.B. White’s authentic Florida Christmas

December 24th, 2024

I found her standing on the hearth with her nose buried in a branch from a balsam fir, which she had hung over the fireplace. With it hung a harness strap of sleigh bells. The branch had unquestionably been whacked from a tree in the woods behind our son’s house in Maine and had made the long trip south. It wore the look and carried the smell of authenticity. “There!” said my wife, as though she had just delivered a baby.

E.B. White

E.B. White did the impossible, brought Christmas to Florida.

White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States: HarperCollins, 2014. pg 192
Mid-December nightfall

December 20th, 2024

The rapid nightfall of mid-December had quite beset the little village as they approached it on soft feet over a first thin fall of powdery snow. Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where the firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through the casements into the dark world without. Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered around the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation.

Winter approaches. Christmas grows closer…

Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. United Kingdom, Welbeck Editions, 2021. p81
Televisonless eccentrics

October 30th, 2024

I live on the Maine coast, to the east of Penobscot Bay. Formerly, this coast was not in the path of hurricanes, or if it was we didn’t seem to know it, but times change and we must change with them. My house is equipped with three small, old-fashioned radios, two of them battery sets, one a tiny plug-in bedside model on which my wife sometimes manages to get the Giants after I have turned in. We do not have television, and because of this curious omission we are looked upon as eccentrics, possibly radicals.

– E.B. White

That from the essay “The Eye of Edna”. A reflection on an approaching storm and the impact of communication technology.

White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States, HarperCollins, 2014. pg 30

Henry D. Thoreau’s month of painted leaves.

October 1st, 2024

     October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

- Henry D. Thoreau

Kick off October with Henry D. Thoreau.

Again from his essay Autumnal Tints.

Thoreau, Henry D.. Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition. Italy, Yale University Press, 2013. p. 283

Autumn in America with Henry D. Thoreau

September 25th, 2024

Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there. The most that Thomson says on this subject is his "Autumn" is contained in the lines, --

     "But see the fading many-colored woods, 
     Shade deepening over shade, the country round
     Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun, 
     Of every hue, from wan declining green 
     To sooty dark" : -

and in the line which he speaks of 

     "Autumn beaming o'er the yellow woods."

No one writes about seasons, weather, or fall, like Henry D. Thoreau.

This from his essay Autumnal Tints.

Thoreau, Henry D.. Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition. Italy, Yale University Press, 2013. p. 281

Spring with Walt Whitman

March 20th, 2024

An excerpt from Warble for Lilac-Time, by Walt Whitman

The maple woods, the crisp February days and the,
sugar making,
The robin where he hops, bright-eyed, brown-breasted, 
With musical clear call at sunrise, and again at sunset,
Or flitting among the trees of the apple-orchard, building 
     the nest of his mate,
The melted snow of March, the willow sending forth its 
     yellow-green sprouts, 
For spring-time is here! the summer is here! and what is
      this in it and from it?

It is Lilac Time. It’s flitting time. Flitting is such a Spring word, isn’t it?

Whitman walks us from February into March. Describes what the Maple and willow trees make, and shares that small image you might miss – the robin building his mate’s nest.

Nature doesn’t pause, with Henry Thoreau

January 17th, 2024

The recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still working and making tracks in the snow.
Henry D. Thoreau

Nature doesn’t pause. This is something we inherently know, but it takes a keen observer like Thoreau to call our attention to it.

Thoreau, Henry D.. Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition. Italy, Yale University Press, 2013. pp28
Henry D. Thoreau and winter morning light

January 16th, 2024

Silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift fall in, and step abroad to face the cutting air. Already the stars have lost some of their sparkle, and a dull leaden mist skirts the horizon. A lurid brazen light in the east proclaims the approach of day, while the western landscape is and spectral still, and clothed in a sombre Tartarrean light, like the shadowy realms.
– Henry D. Thoreau

That from Thoreau’s essay, a Winter Walk. The Tartarrean light refers to Tartarus, the lowest section of the underworld in Greek mythology.

Thoreau opens by opening his door and describing winter morning to us. Morning is a transition of light. Thoreau mentions light, in some form, three times in two sentences.

“Already the stars have lost some of their sparkle“

“A lurid brazen light in the east proclaims the approach of day“

“clothed in a sombre Tartarrean light“

Read A Winter Walk in full here.

Or pick up this helpful version Henry D. Thoreau Essays, full annotated edition from Yale press.

Thoreau, Henry D.. Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition. Italy, Yale University Press, 2013. pp28
For Christmas Day: Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter, by Robert Frost

December 25th, 2023
```
The west was getting out of gold, 
The breath of air had died of cold,
When shoeing home across the white,
I thought I saw a bird alight.

In summer when I passed the place
I had to stop and lift my face;
A bird with an angelic gift
Was singing in it sweet and swift.

No bird was singing in it now.
A single leaf was on a bough,
And that was all there was to see
In going twice around the tree.

From my advantage on a hill
I judged that such a crystal chill
Was only adding frost to snow
As gilt to gold that wouldn't show.

A brush had left a crooked stroke
Of what was either cloud or smoke
From north to south across the blue;
A piercing little star was through.
```
It may be “un-literary” to admit, but part of the joy of reading Robert Frost’s poems are that they rhyme. Copying them out gives you the feeling of transcribing song lyrics into your 6th grade Mead Composition notebook.

My favorite bit from this poem is when Frost briefly takes us back to summer in the second stanza, before for dropping us off in winter again three lines later. Brilliant how he fits that glimpse of summer in to give us the context of the present emptiness of that place.

Merry Christmas dear readers!

Frost, Robert. New Hampshire. United States, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2019. pg100
December 6th, 1833. The Beagle in Patagonia

December 7th, 2023

Near Fernando Noronha the sea gave out light in flashes. The appearance was very similar to that which might be expected from a large fish moving rapidly through a luminous fluid. To this cause the sailors attributed it; at the time, however, I entertained some doubts, on account of the frequency and rapidity of the flashes. With respect to any general observations, I have already stated that the display is very much more common in warm than in cold countries. I have sometimes imagined that a disturbed electrical condition of the atmosphere was most favourable to its production. Certainly I think the sea is most luminous after a few days of more calm weather than ordinary, during which time it has swarmed with various animals. Observing that the water charged with gelatinous particles is in an impure state, and that the luminous appearance in all common cases is produced by the agitation of the fluid in contact with the atmosphere, I have always been inclined to consider that the phosphorescence was the result of the decomposition of the organic particles, by which process (one is tempted to call it a kind of respiration) the ocean becomes purified.
– Charles Darwin

The passage reminded me of this exchange between Steve Zissou and Ned Plimpton:

Ned Plimpton: Steve what produces this effect of illumination? Is there a chemical inside the organism?

Steve Zissou: No Ned actually the reflection of the moonlight on their outer membrane…that’s a very good ad lib.

This post was inspired by this essay: Charles Darwin: The Best Scientist-Writer of All Time

Darwin, Charles. Voyage of the Beagle. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 1989. pp 152,153