Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, September 1, 1935

7:00 AM for a walk – the usual route. At the end of the village, on Clinton Street, I watched a flock of birds in a ragged erratic flight over the railroad – They were like a flexible net of some kind, now expanding, and now contracting, and always changing shape, but held together by invisible strands of some sort that never broke. As they turned, one side of the “net” would suddenly become dense and dark and as abruptly “melt” again as they expanded. They gradually flew in my direction, and as they swept by overhead, the soft swooshing of their myriad wings had a mysterious character. They flew eastward directly into the sun.

It was cool enough to make the locomotive exhausts belch with white clouds, and the dogs breathed “steam,” and their wet coats likewise threw off clouds of fog –

Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, September 1, 1935