Poor Will's Almanack

The change of season always changes me. Weather and landscape, seem to be the obvious parts of that transformation. I read a little about how other people react. Robert Kull, author of Solitude: Seeking wisdom in extremes, spent a year alone in the wilds of Patagonia. He wrote: “There is physical weather – sun, rain, wind – which just is, and my emotional response – pleasure, peace, anger, anxiety – that I associate with the weather. If I can tease these aspects apart and experience weather as

In his natural history of east-central Ohio, Idle Weeds, David Rains Wallace writes: “If time is a story, the present is merely a hiatus between the significant events that were and will be. "If time is an ocean, however, the present is not less important than other moments, which stretch away on all sides, any more than a single water molecule in an ocean is less important than the others.” I like this impression of time, especially as summer wanes. The changes in the leaves and flowers, the

It seems that the same day never returns, that any act is done when it is done. It seems that at the end of August, summer is over. It seems that this summer can never come again. Memory easily shows, however, that events do not end when they take place. Like the waves that form the Butterfly Effect, all happenings ripple time. And instead of receding from a present tense, this infinity of instances spins far out and then returns over and over again like a shower of shooting stars, shining

As Late Summer begins, all the katydids sing after sundown. They call out the close of the Dog Days, and even though heat often lingers, the rhythm of the season has shifted, its tones have been altered, colors and sounds and scents all pointing to fall. Migration clucking among the robins increases. Some days, there is a long and steady cardinal song before sunrise, then silence. Hummingbirds, wood ducks, Baltimore orioles and purple martins start to disappear south; their departure marks a

In his book, Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane writes about the role of imagination in a person’s approach to space and place. The mountains that people climb, he writes, must first exist and be conquered in their minds. When he actually climbed mountains, Macfarlane discovered “that the mountains one gazes at, reads about, dreams of and desires are not the mountains one climbs.” The real mountains are “matters of hard, steep rock and freezing snow…of vertigo…of hypertension, nausea and

The philosopher and psychologist Carl Jung used the word, “synchronicity” to describe "temporally coincident occurrences" that may be related by their meaning. In the context of nature, the days themselves are formed and defined from “temporally coincident occurrences,” that is, events happening at the same time, events that reveal to the very blossom and tadpole the meaning of space and time. Things happen together: that is what makes the world make sense. Things like: The blooming of purple

There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things , writes George Borrow in a passage from his novel, Lavengro. There’s sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things…. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die? In my notes for this week of the year, I find myself in the middle of butterflies, days of color and nectar, drifting and soaring. These days, I can see were the sweetest. I remember one year four yellow and black tiger swallowtails all together a on deep purple butterfly bush

Now if we let ourselves believe, it might seem that summer will never end. Even in the face of the changes taking place around us, we might to choose to remain here in the center of the year where the heat and humidity create a backwater of time. This is the season in which anticipation cedes to acceptance. It is a time of self-deception. In the same way that the depths of winter seem to erase the possibility that the cold and gray can ever end, Deep Summer seems to promise only green leaves and

I walk into the woods and pastures to touch Deep Summer, finding August’s white snakeroot with huge buds, stinging wood nettle with its Late Summer petals, wingstem ready to open, parsnips half to seed but still flowering enough to make part of the field yellow, while the other part is white with daisy fleabane. Wild onions are blooming. Virginia roses still bright pink. Prickly buckeye fruits, an inch in diameter, are hanging from the trees. Canadian thistles are gray, some thistle down loosed

The Milkweed Bug Mating Moon was new and dark, just a shadow high in the east before dawn. The the rain had finally ended, and the barometer was rising. By the time the grackles woke up at 6:00, the chorus of cardinals and doves and sparrows was loud and raucous. Then a breeze passed through the trees, and the grackles became louder, their calls drowning out the other singers as the sun came up. This eruption of grackle activity takes place in my yard every year at the beginning of June. Almost