Etymology; Gossamer Season

Henry David Thoreau was fascinated by the seasons and fall in particular and within fall Indian summer especially. He wrote that to one who pays close attention there are many seasons, “more than are represented in the almanac,” marked as they are by subtle shifts in light and atmosphere or the autumnal blooms of witch hazel and bird’s-foot violets. And although his later writings became more simply descriptive, in the 1850s, as he wrote of fall, he was keenly aware of metaphor, of Indian summer standing in as a last and ephemeral expression of youth, a pulse of life and spring before the killing freeze of winter, before the quiescence of the snows. Kinda hard to miss, actually.

Nearly every culture has its own take on Indian summer, whose first known appearance came in a 1778 book called Letters from an American Farmer, penned by French-American J. H. St. John de Crèvecoeur, who wrote that the deepest frost “is often preceded by a short