Poor Will's Almanack

Late Spring comes to an end throughout the East this week as the high canopy of leaves closes all the way. Even though the sycamores may hold back for a week or so, now there is a convergence of events that pushes the land over the edge into early summer. I first noticed the effect of the seasons on my mind when I spent a year in the tropics. The homesickness I experienced was not so much for family or friends, but for the deciduous trees and the sharp air, the flowers I had ignored, and for all

Everything happens so quickly between the end of March and the middle of May. Bare trees fill out, and the brown, silent earth comes completely alive. The feelings that move over me in the wake of all those changes range from exhilaration and joy to disappointment to a sense of being overwhelmed, to a sense of sadness. I wonder if what I was really waiting for was spring or if I was caught up in a different kind of longing, an obsession with the idea of rebirth, thinking that spring was a

I got up a little after 5:00 in the morning. My window was open, and the air was cool and damp. I felt the anxiety and fear that sometimes greet me when I wake. I was still tired and wanted to stay in bed, but remnants of my dreams kept me from going back to sleep and finally pulled me up. I listened for birds at my window as I got dressed. Not a sound, not even a car passing . And then I went outside with Bella, my border collie, to walk in the dark. I heard birds by the time I reached the

In the course of my almanack record keeping, I have found that soil temperatures generally follow the normal average air temperatures within maybe ten degrees. But in the spring, the ground often lags behind the weather, remaining cold, and causing considerable anguish to the farmer and gardener. For example, if your beans go in before the earth is warm enough, they rot where you lay them. “Nothing sprouts,” says the ancient Greek sage, Theophrastus, “before its proper time.” At least I think he

Cross-Quarter Day is April 21, a day before Earth Day this year, the day on which the sun reaches halfway between equinox and solstice, and enters the late spring sign of Taurus. Now the meager inventories of change that characterized equinox quickly fill with new details each day. The floral and faunal fragments of the season multiply, literally filling in the space of Earth with tangible, visible clockwork. The first parsnips rise through the wetlands, and all major garden weeds are sprouting.

The older I become, the more I am aware of the sources of my moods, the more I see the almost deciduous nature of my emotions, the clear and critical relationship between the outside world, the passage of the seasons, and my mind. I've found that my self is somehow loose, unanchored, and that it continually needs an abundance of landmarks and time tellers, needs colors, and aromas, and textures over and over in order to find meaning, orientation, and place. Support from a human society often

“I believe,” wrote the poet Robinson Jeffers, “that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole….” Under the spell of middle spring, it is not so difficult to feel part of that one being, to sense that we express its energy and hope. Because this is the week of pale violets in the lawn and vast patches of dandelions along the roadsides. Serviceberry and red-flowered

In his 1989 classic, The End of Nature , ecologist Bill McKibben talks about people’s expectations that spring will come the way it always has come. There may, of course, be cold springs and warm springs, wet springs and dry springs, but what if our deeper expectations are unmet? What if spring is so cold or so warm that it becomes a different season altogether? And what happens, McKibben asks, if our certainty about the predictable sequence of nature falters? People ask me whether I have seen

Recent events have unnerved me and pulled me just a little out of my lazy spring fever. It seems very clear that the global environment will be challenged more than ever during the years ahead. Well, I attempt to begin to respond: I return to Gary Snyder’s poem, “For the Children", and his admonition to stay together, to learn the flowers and to go light. So I have learned a lot of flowers in the past decades of my life. I start there. I see that floral taxonomy is not so much a matter of botany

The exact end of winter came well before the most recent thaws, arriving unseen in the coldest weeks of the year when flower bulbs and buds followed their own schedules and began to show beneath and above the snow. Walking through town this morning, I found that some daffodils were budding, some even blooming, and a few tulips and hyacinths were up four or five inches. Snowdrops, snow crocus and aconite were already past their prime. Lilac buds were swollen, fat green and gold. Pussy willow