December 1st
The 335th Day of the Year

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Percy Bysshe Shelly

Sunrise/set: 7:37/5:11 Day's Length: 9 hours 34 minutes
Average High/Low: 44/29 Average Temperature: 36
Record High: 67 - 1970 Record Low: 4 - 1964

Weather
Chances for a mild or warm day improve by 40 percent over yesterday’s chances, making this the December day most likely to bring temperatures above 50 degrees (there’s a 45 percent chance of that). Highs are in the 40s fifteen percent of the time, in the 30s twenty percent, in the 20s twenty percent. The sun shines seven years out of ten. Rain falls an average of one year in five. Snow comes once in a decade. Early winter, a pivotal time of decisive cold, is likely to arrive within the next few days, no later than the 8th.

Natural Calendar
In the first week of December, the day becomes shorter by even minutes, the last time this year that the day loses that much time. Sunset is the earliest of the year today; it will remain at that time until December 13th.
December is the darkest month of the year, with only a 14- minute variation in the day's length between the first and the 31st. Despite the gains in sunset time (sunset becomes later by nine minutes between the 14th and the 31st), the night still grows by ten minutes in the course of the month.

Daybook
1983: Most all the seeds are gone from the milkweed pods; just a few wisps of down cling to their shells. Despite the cold, rain and flurries, a few forsythia leaves hang on. All Osage and mock orange have fallen.

1986: Next to the shed, a huge pokeweed stem, hollow, brown, fallen, exploded from the cold last night.

1988: I went out through the dead goldenrod, past my fishing hole, to the middle prairie. I sat by rose hips and listened to the wind until the sun went down behind the dark oaks on the west ridge.

l989: Cardinal sings off and on all day. Pears two-thirds gone downtown.

1990: All pear leaves finally down in the village.

1991: Lettuce and spinach, covered with straw, are still edible in the garden. Carrots are still firm. Kale and collards are still providing greens. Garlic shoots are strong and green, but they've stopped growing, remain at their mid-November three-inch height. A few mums are still alive, provided scattered color by the bird feeder.

1996: Pears still not gone. Beech holds at maybe half, leaves rust-brown. Crows in the yard this morning, also seen along Dayton Street on the way home from church. A few yellow forsythia blooming by the front fence.

1997: One witchhazel done blooming, one full bloom on Dayton Street.

1999: Deep freeze this morning, temperatures in the teens, pond has ice for the second morning in a row, the first two ice mornings of the winter. Pear trees lit up at night with Christmas lights, but they still keep maybe a fourth of their brown foliage. The street and sidewalks, though, are covered with their burnished leaves.

2003: A cardinal was singing at 7:30 this morning when I took the garbage outside. Walking Bella, I saw forsythia flowers in bloom low to the ground by the front fence. At the covered bridge in the late afternoon, the river was high but clear from the weekend’s rain and snow. All but a few honeysuckle berries had disappeared. A flock of robins fluttered in a white sycamore. A pileated woodpecker flew by. The half moon lay in the bright blue eastern sky. Downtown, almost all the yellow pear leaves had fallen.

2007: Blustery, clouding up, storm moving in, snow and ice in Chicago and the Plains, dire predictions for the East. I build up the fire and hunker down. In my work room, I pull down the shade to the outside piles of leaves. I pull up the hood on my sweat suit. So many of the partial steps to winter have been taken between the middle of the past warm November and today. As Advent begins, so truly does a new year. Even though plenty remnants hang on throughout the village, there is not enough to keep me looking for the past in this present, not enough to keep me from plotting the beginning of another cycle.

2008: Wind and flurries. The alley was quiet this morning, no more robins clucking, no starlings whistling. Barometer slowly rising after yesterday’s dip below 29.30. Downtown, the pear leaves hold, but they are have lost their bright color, are pale, sickly yellow green. In the back yard, a kaleidoscope of dark, fallen autumn colors, dulled further by the rain. The progress of the new year will be measured in their changes. The decay of the Osage fruit through the months ahead will also time the winter.

December 2nd
The 336th Day of the Year

No one suspects the days to be gods.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sunrise/set: 7:38/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 32 minutes
Average High/Low: 44/28 Average Temperature: 36
Record High: 72 - 1982 Record Low: 1 - 1886

Weather
Although today and tomorrow can see 70 degrees five percent of the time, high temperatures are rarely in the 60s, reach the 50s twenty-five percent of the days, are in the 40s twenty percent, in the 30s thirty percent, are in the 20s fifteen percent, and in the teens five percent. Strong north wind helps nighttime lows drop below freezing 80 percent of the nights. Precipitation: one day in three, with the odds even for rain or snow.

Natural Calendar
The normal seasons need no predictions. The averages around which we plan our lives are fixed by history, and they hold true seven or eight out of every ten years.
December nights are usually in the middle and upper 20s throughout Ohio, and typical highs reach about 45 in southern counties and those along Lake Erie, only 35 in the mountains and the central counties. January is the most extreme of the three winter months, highs averaging only in the 30s, and nighttime temperatures usually in the teens and 20s. February is typically about like December.
The dates for deepest cold are readily available to anyone ho keeps a weather journal. In general, the third week of December, the first 20 days of January and the first seven days of February are the most frigid of the year. If it's going to be terrible winter, the worst winds will blow during these five weeks.
From another perspective, just ten fronts out of the winter's 20 are usually severe. The approximate days (predicable within 48 hours either way) for the arrival of those air systems are December 8, 15, 20, January 1, 5, 11, 15, February 2, 7, 12.
Snow usually accompanies most of these fronts. In the northern part of the state, normal snowfall for December, January and February totals about 25 inches. Central counties: 17 inches. Southern counties: 10 inches.
But is there a chance for a bitter cold and stormy winter like the one that hit back in '78? The odds are always against it. Great freezes are rare. The past century has only produced a dozen bone- chilling Decembers, the most recent to the end of the 20th century occurring in l983 when five dawns registered below zero, and temperatures stayed below 20 for a full seven days. January is always the most dramatic month for cold. But only 14 of the last 100 have been exceptionally fierce. And just ten Februarys have been unusually cool since the end of the l9th century.
And what are the odds for all three months being completely cold? About three in 100: the closest the area ever came to such a winter was in 1884 -1885, 1962 - 1963 and 1977-1978.

Daybook
1982: 70 degrees, sky pale turquoise: Grass snake in the sun by the river. Sounds of squirrels, chickadees, sparrows, grackles, doves, and downy woodpeckers fill the woods. Catnip grows back along High Street. In South Glen: thistle, moneywort, chickweed, wild geranium, leafcup, purple deadnettle, yarrow. At the far fence line, where the woods ends, thistles were stronger, their bright leaves in clusters hugging the ground. Japanese honeysuckle still November green at home.

1984: Reports of hepatica blooming in the warm late autumn.

1988: First paperwhites, started November 22, bloomed today.

1990: Early winter comes in about this time every year. The percent of mild days falls sharply on my graph around November 28th. Then the two high-pressure systems that come through during the first week of December usually make an end to late fall. The last osage leaves fell overnight. More raking to be done. In the garden, lettuce is still crisp and sweet. Geese flew over in the dark, 5:45 p.m.

1992: Today, the barometer is low, 29.65, the first storm of early winter coming in this afternoon. Reading the daybook, comfort in the circle of years, memories tempering and coloring this gray weather now.

1995: The last woolly-bear caterpillars mark one of the many borders of autumn, like the silver maple, pear and beech leaves falling, the arrival of the crows west of Springfield, new growth on the spruce, the flowering of witch hazel, the first snow. Driving south to Hillsboro on December 2nd, I watched for woolly-bears crossing the road. The sun was bright; it made the wheat fields and pastures glow. The road surface was warm, perfect for caterpillars. They had been out, after weeks of cold, when I came home from Wilberforce on November 20th, three orange and black ones moving across the pavement in the mild afternoon. That was the latest I'd noticed them since beginning to travel Wilberforce-Clifton and Grinnell Roads in 1978. I thought maybe they'd appear again, but the end of November must normally be the outside limit of their activity.

1999: The yellow leaves of the New England aster fall quickly now, the tufted seed heads grow more prominent.

2000: Yucca stalks down this morning, toppled from the weight of the last night’s snow.

2001: After a warm November, in soft rain, the grass outside my door is lush and bright, the last Osage leaves golden above the shed. Along the west wall of the house, Shasta daisies are still in bloom. Wild onions are getting lanky, motherwort is bushy, one Queen Anne’s lace plant has grown back two-feet tall.
Inside the garden: fresh rosemary, thyme, oregano, fat chard still good for picking. Strawberry leaves are turning red and orange. Dry pumpkin-brown heads of marigold quiver in the wind. By the pond: velvety gray lamb’s ear, and blush on the wild geranium. By the front door, lamium purpureum, dead nettle, full of new growth and purple flowers, dusky forsythia still blocking the street, pink azalea leaves forecasting their spring blossoms.
New chickweed under the rhododendrons, new clover, two new dandelions, henbit deep summer green. Under the apple tree, one wild strawberry flower. To one side of the woodpile, very late blue forget-me-nots.
Along the north hedge, orange euonymus berries pushing out from their white pods, late honeysuckle berries, strong sweet William growth, tawny leaves of the goosefoot, feathery achillea returning, butterfly bush and comfrey, dock, garlic mustard are all vigorous, two deep yellow roses are surrounded by mint, three pale violet sweet rocket flowers nestle against the old stone wall.

2002: Honeysuckle leaves shriveled from the frost, but the Japanese honeysuckle vine still provides some privacy for the windows along the east garden.

2003: Starlings chatter in the morning under the bright sun. At about 11:00, Rick Donahoe called to tell me he had just seen a flock of maybe a hundred cranes honking and flying over his house on Wright Street. “They were going straight south,” he said. Sand-hill cranes? Maybe blue herons? Rick didn’t think they were herons. “I’ve seen cranes out West,” he told me. “These were like cranes.”
I saw Phil Hawke downtown a little later. “Sure,” he said, “they’re cranes. They couldn’t be anything else.”

2005: Cold and blustery this morning. At South Glen, seven mallards were swimming up and down in the Little Miami River. At the corner of Hyde and Grinnell, scores of Osage fruits, all weathered from chartreuse to yellow-brown, were spread out in the grass, each ball covered with a hat of snow. The subfreezing temperatures of the past weeks have put an end to almost every leaf in the woods. Downtown, the shriveled pear foliage holds at only maybe a third.

2008: Light snow and low in the 20s this morning, full early winter. One robin heard in the alley, but no other sound. The bittersweet berries have emerged all the way from their hulls ; the winterberries are all pushing out.

December 3rd
The 337th Day of the Year

But let the months go round, a few short months,
And all shall be restored. These naked shoots
Barren as lances, among which the wind
Makes wintry music, sighing as it goes,
Shall put their graceful foliage on again,
And more aspiring and with ampler spread
Shall boast new charms, and more than they have lost.

William Cowper

Sunrise/set: 7:39/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 31 minutes
Average High/Low: 43/28 Average Temperature: 36
Record High 71 - 1982 Record Low: 0 - 1929

Weather
Chances for highs in the 70s are five percent, for 60s ten percent, for 50s fifteen percent, for 40s ten percent, for 30s fifty percent, for 20s ten percent. Skies are cloudy almost two-thirds of the time; rain falls one year in three, snow less than once in a decade. This morning is the first since March 9th that carries a five percent chance for the temperature to drop to zero or below.

The Natural Calendar
South-window tomatoes sown in August could be ripening as December arrives. Marigolds, zinnias, impatiens and other bedding plants saved from a hard freeze will still be in flower. T
The first buds will have formed on mother-of-millions. The greenhouse hibiscus will bloom, opening before dawn, fading and falling by three in the afternoon. Poinsettias, placed in the dark about 17 hours a day through late fall, should be turning red.

Daybook
1980: The first cold front of early winter came in today after yesterday's wind and flurries.

1982: The high reached a record 71 today. My charts give December 6th as the latest date in the past century for an afternoon above 70. The next possible date after the 6th is January 21st.

1988: Sun, wind, 50 degrees, not a single cloud. Everything seems so transparent and focused today in the brightness. The crisp air made the trees and plants stand out – or else it sharpened my eye. The river was down and clear as I've ever seen it. There were dozens of carp and suckers in schools at Far Hole, but they wouldn't take tough balls or worms. The pasture at Middle Prairie was full of spring growth, green with asters, mullein, clover, chickweed, purple deadnettle, dandelions (one even blooming), and winter cress. One grasshopper found, and I heard two cardinals calling back and forth, and then a mocking bird.

1990: Early winter arrives on schedule tonight after wind all day and snow bursts.

1991: Today the composition of early winter seems plain and distinct. The absence of migratory birds magnifies the rattle of the downy woodpecker and the calling of the crows. Nothing is concealed by foliage. The natural year is complete and therefore finite and countable. Now there's enough time to look at everything. I can list remnants at leisure. I can rebuild the summer and document spring's progress with simple, reassuring measurements.
My friend Cajuvian always told me that tallying pieces of the seasons was all anyone could do. “There isn’t really any transcendence,” he said. “The excitement and promise of the middle of the year seem to offer a covenant with eternity. But really there’s nothing to that promise except a few dried berries, shells, and bare branches.”
This afternoon was quiet and cold. The black centers of the empty milkweed pods faced the sun. Thistle and garlic mustard, still green, clustered close to the ground. A sparrow hawk was back; it watched the pasture from the barbed wire. Mike Tripplett said that the hawks come to Ohio when the snow gets deep in the north, and the mice are safe under the frozen cover. Here, the fields are still accessible.
There were ducks on the river, no ice yet, even along the sloughs. Osage fruits were open, shredded by the squirrels. The seed heads of ironweed were pale and soft, their stalks hung with love vine by the swamp. Gnats swarmed out of the wind.
I saw black-capped chickadees, a flicker, four titmice, three silent cardinals, white sycamores, some orange honeysuckle berries still left, red rose hips, broken, dark angelica. Doves scattered when I walked through the goldenrod. Skunk cabbage was up at the swamp past the covered bridge.
Tonight, the sun went down at its earliest time of the year. Orion was in the east after supper, the Pleiades overhead, red Taurus between them. The northern cross was setting over Dayton. Sirius came up an hour before midnight.

2001: A cardinal sang outside the back door at 7:15 this morning.

2004: Although most of the pear leaves have fallen in Yellow Springs, many pears still have all their foliage in Dayton.

2008: Mild south wind this morning and dropping barometer. Rain forecast for tonight, snow tomorrow. A tufted titmouse heard this morning in the alley. Juncos seen yesterday at the back feeder. Most of the lilac and forsythia leaves are down. Only the Japanese honeysuckle leaves and the bamboo remain green. Artichoke leaves twisted and stiff. The cold and dusting of snow have darkened the Osage and mock orange leaves on the ground in the back yard. This is a time of deeper browning, a further settling of autumn’s fibers. Endless summer hydrangea flowers are all pale tan. All remnants of the hostas have dissolved into the light garden mulch.

December 4th
The 338th Day of the Year

Through his iron glades
Rides Winter the Huntsman.
All colour fades
As his horn is heard sighing.

Osbert Sitwell

Sunrise/set: 7:40/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 30 minutes
Average High/Low: 43/28 Average Temperature: 35
Record High: 67 - 2001 Record Low: 9 - 1935

Weather
Highs remain in the teens five percent of the days, are in the 30s six years in ten, warm into the 40s twenty percent of the time, into the 50 ten percent, and into the 60s five percent. Precipitation is relatively infrequent, rain or snow only falling 25 percent of the years. Clouds, however, are more common than sun; overcast conditions occur 55 percent of the time.

Natural Calendar
In the woods, white-tailed deer enter their secondary rutting period, which lasts approximately two weeks. Sparrow hawks have arrived, hunting for mice in the snowless fields. Skunk cabbage has often emerged in the swamps. The early-winter wind scatters the last of the milkweed seeds along the roadsides.

Daybook
1982: Unusual early December warm spell, new record high of 66 today. Purple deadnettle, catnip, chickweed, henbit continue to grow as if it were spring.

1983: Sparrows chirping steadily much of the morning and
afternoon. One dandelion blooming in the melting snow. One robin
in the back hedge.

1984: Red-tailed hawk seen on the way to Wilberforce. In town, a few beech leaves still hold along Dayton Street, a third of the forsythia too. After last night’s hard freeze, silver maples are withering. The pears downtown are thinning quickly.

1986: The decadence of late fall stops now. The landscape is complete for the next three months. The fishing hole, Middle Prairie, and Far Prairie will remain quiet and stable, bare and predictable.

1988: The greenhouse so quiet this morning. The sun is just beginning to show against the west wall on the highest leaves of the biggest poinsettia. Robin seen in the yard today. Was it the same one I saw last week; is it wintering over in the honeysuckles?

1989: Winter colors forming all around me, blacks, browns, grays, with red berries and patches of green along the paths.

1992: The pear foliage on Xenia Avenue holds at maybe 15 percent of their leaves. Geese fly over at 12:35 p.m. South Glen this afternoon, cloudy, maybe 40 degrees, light wind: Clover foliage keeping the paths green, with some dandelions, some plantain. Wind in the dry grass and bare branches, oak leaves rustling, distant crows intermittent, no other birds for the first miles. Then the scream of a robin as though he were frightened or had been attacked. Crane flies follow me up to High Prairie. Moss is still bright beside me, becomes the dominant green in the woods. A few red raspberry leaves at the top of the hill, an occasional bank of honeysuckle berries. Nettles, protected by wild roses, grow back in the valley, a foot tall. Top sweet gum seed balls hold. Teasel dark in the dull goldenrod fields.
Osage all yellow on the ground. Pale greens and pastels of the lichens. Then the landscape down the valley: bands of grays and browns above a sky of light stratus clouds. The trees black, pasture chartreuse: a cross section of the winter, veins of this time. On the footbridge from Jacoby, black walnut hulls, shredded, staining the wood purple. Coming back, I saw a pair of flickers; they screeched then flew west off toward the river. At Sycamore Hole, three tan moths, between half an inch and an inch wingspan, struggled through the cold. I fished there: only one bite.
The listing of the pieces of the last season is complete. These fragments belong to the new season, early winter, the first season of the new year.

1993: Flowers of the caraway – which volunteered from seed when the ferns were planted last May – have finally turned brown.

1997: Bradford pear leaves are yellow and black, maybe three-fourths down. Neysa says the sparrows still chant in the trees outside her Xenia Avenue apartment half an hour before dawn.

2002: Leaves shriveled on the spirea and butterfly bush from cold in the teens this morning. The pond has started to freeze over.

2005: Medium-sized camel cricket found floating in the dog’s water this morning.

2006: From Yellow Springs south to Asheville, NC. Sun and cold throughout the day. The roadside grass definitely grew greener as we drove down I-75. Some honeysuckle leaves were left on bushes near Lexington and then again at Knoxville, but no other foliage seen except on one white oak. Flocks of starlings seen off and on throughout, one flock feasting on honeysuckle berries. The full moon came up at 5:15 as the sun went down behind us.

2007: At five to eleven yesterday, Casey called on his cell. He was taking the back way to Springfield north down Polecat Road when he saw all the crows. “It’s a murder of crows!” he said, and I could hear the excitement in his voice. “They’re all over in the fields on either side of the road just past Ellis Pond.”
I took Bella, the family dog, jumped into the truck and headed out to see what was going on. I could see them all the way from Fairfield Pike, and I drove slowly down the hill into the feeding murder (a murder being the correct name for a crow flock – and not some senseless slaughter).
Bella was as fascinated as I was as we moved through the birds at maybe ten miles and hour. They were cleaning up the soybean field on the east side of Polecat and the cornfield on the west side. I had counted about a hundred starlings in Mateo’s black walnut tree earlier that morning, and I could tell there were hundreds of crows, maybe a thousand around us. They were indifferent to traffic, and they crossed the road leisurely, floating up to let the cars go by and settling down to feed. Tame as hungry gulls at the beach or honeybees around their hive, the crows were masters of the landscape.
I thought they might stay and spend the winter near the pond (like they sometimes do a little further north of town), but they were gone the next day. Still, there was more news. Casey called twice today. This time he was unloading a pickup near the Antioch golf course and saw sandhill cranes flying over Glen Helen, the first flock around 11:30 in the morning, making “that long whistling sound, almost a yodel.” He went home for lunch and heard another flock “coming right over the house. Wilma saw them, too!” They were heading south, of course, flying hard, Casey said, “in front of that storm coming in from the northwest.”

December 5th
The 339th Day of the Year

I rejoice in the winter landscape, cut to essentials. Earth and sky are more closely joined.

Harlan Hubbard

Sunrise/set: 7:41/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 29 minutes
Average High/Low: 42/27 Average Temperature: 35
Record High: 67 - 1998 Record Low: 6 - 1901

Weather
Today's high temperature distribution is as follows: 25 percent chance for 50s, forty percent for 40s, thirty percent for 30s, and 15 percent for 20s or teens. Skies are overcast half the time; chances for precipitation: 35 percent. Until 1994, December 5th was the latest date for snow in central Ohio. The record was broken that December, the latest date moved to December 10th.

Natural Calendar
In a moderate Ohio autumn, a few snapdragons and yarrows can still be budding. The dead nettle still has blossoms. Basal leaf clusters grow back on carnations, sweet rockets, chickweed, purple deadnettle, celandine, garlic mustard, poppies, lamb’s ear, daisies. Until the hardest frost, St. John’s wort, lavender, butterfly bush, euonymus, and Japanese honeysuckle keep their leaves. The mint is still fragrant. Parsley and thyme are still green and firm for seasoning.

Daybook
1982: Record high today of 63.

1984: Forsythia leaves give way to the hard freezes. Beets and Chinese cabbage survive five days of very cold temperatures. First greenhouse tomatoes, planted on July 16th, harvested today.

1989: Cardinal sings sporadically through the day.

1994: Cress is reaching up from the water now. Garlic mustard continues to grow taller. The first and second cold fronts of December have failed to arrive (there have only been five mornings of frost since May), and second spring keeps coming. Cardinals singing off and on through the morning.

1997: Crows and blue jays this morning at 8:08 a.m. I worked in the garden in the middle of flurries, turning over the ground, changing the snow into black wet soil. Gray all day and humid, the sun showing up just a few minutes about four o’clock. The pond temperature is down to 42 degrees, the fish huddle motionless at the bottom near the water pump. It felt like the first day of early winter today.

1998: New record high of 67 today.

2000: Camel-back cricket killed in the house by one of the cats last night.

2001: Shirtsleeve day. Cardinals sang early, then off and on through the morning. In the campus lawn: dandelions, shepherd’s purse, clover, and sow thistles were blooming. The afternoon was calm and soft and sweet, sky hazy blue, light breeze, the grass brightening after an initial November yellowing. Treetops bare and lean. Forsythia in full bloom on Winter Street. Even one of our bushes along the east fence had flowered.

2006: Asheville, North Carolina to Daytona Beach, Florida. In Asheville, the air was cool, not a cloud in the sky, temperatures in the 50s. Coming out of the mountains this morning, about 100 miles northwest of Columbia, South Carolina, we began to see some foliage on trees, gold-brown small leaves. White and red oaks complemented the unidentified smaller leaves. Below Columbia, the foliage grew thicker, much thicker by Savannah and Brunswick. Sweet gums and yellow poplars joined the growing sense of autumn. Below Jacksonville, the habitat changed again, the color of the waysides almost solid green. Two myrtle flowers bloomed at a rest stop near St. Augustine. Back home in Yellow Springs, a tremendous high-pressure system is bringing temperatures into the teens again tonight.

2007: First snow of the season last night and this morning, four to five inches. The sparrows are ravenous at the feeder, but the rest of High Street is quiet, no starlings in Don’s tree, no starling chatter in the neighborhood. The alley bamboo is full of snow, bowing and blocking half my path there. At home, our bamboo has arched over the half-frozen pond. Large camel cricket found on the bedroom floor.

 

 

December 6th
The 340th Day of the Year

If we are to live in the present, being truly alive, then everything recedes except these simple things that we observe, these particular movements that we make: the color of a leaf, the walk in the garden.

Robert Orwell, O.S.B.

Sunrise/set: 7:42/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 28 minutes
Average High/Low: 42/27 Average Temperature: 35
Record High: 70 - 1956 Record Low: - 1 - 1977

Weather
There is a five percent chance for highs in the 60s or 70s, twenty percent for 50s, thirty-five for 40s, twenty percent for 30s, fifteen percent for 20s, and five percent for teens. Chances for rain today are 35 percent, for snow 15 percent, and totally overcast conditions occur six years in a decade. This is the last day for the slightest chance of a high above 70 until January 21st. And from today until March 1st, record low temperatures in the Dayton area remain below zero.

Natural Calendar
The mild autumn and early winter temperatures of 2001 gave a sample of what Yellow Springs might be like under a benign wave of global warming. Averages were about five degrees above normal in November and December that year, and such warmth is more characteristic of the upper Border States than of the lower Midwesd. If the earth’s climate is indeed changing, the Yellow Springs of 2050 might consistently enjoy a more moderate winter, something similar to an average 20th century winter in Washington DC, Louisville, Kentucky, or the Piedmont of North Carolina.
Under that climatic regimen, local turkey vultures would be staying the whole year instead of leaving at the end of October, joining the Yellow Springs geese to further mellow our suburban habitat.
Although the leaves would still be down, falling more in response to the day’s length than to extremes of cold, the vegetation in woods and fields would be showing signs of a new season, one which had surfaced only briefly in the centuries before.
Following leafdrop, the land in and around Glen Helen always passes through a “second spring” in which the foliage of certain wildflowers starts growing back as though winter had already come and gone. Up until now, severe cold has always destroyed this revival or held it firmly in abeyance.
With a new seasonal order, second spring would simmer in the undergrowth then gradually push out all the way into first spring a month or two before its parallels of the mid and late 1900’s. Every November would bring a complete second flowering of golden forsythia. Dandelions would always be in bloom. White clover, red clover, chickweed, bittercress, black medic, and shepherd’s purse would open beside them. Purple deadnettle would spread and blossom all over the gardens. Lanky yellow sow thistles would quiver by the roadsides.
Pussy willows might be out for New Year’s Eve. Crocus and daffodils would grace the middle of January. The grass would become long, dark green and lush, needing to be cut every few weeks. Emerald wheat would transform the fields, surging to its April height by the end of January. Moss would stretch to the sun on its wet logs. Caraway, Queen Anne’s lace, poison hemlock, ragwort, dock, wild parsnip, and yarrow would reclaim their March territories by Groundhog Day. Autumn violets would become April violets without pause.

Daybook
1986: South Glen, 37 degrees: One duck on the river, two kingfishers chasing back and forth, sparrows chattering, milkweed pods half open, disheveled seeds half out in the wind, osage fruits yellowing, broken and scattered by squirrels or opossums, parsnips burned from frost, goldenrod and asters in tufts, heads of the iron week still intact, pale and soft, craneflies swarming, honeysuckle berries and red rose hips holding (and two new rose leaves pushing out), oak bark black and shining, white sycamores, purple raspberry stalks, gray-blue clouds, woodpeckers rattling on the far side of the field. At Jacoby swamp, skunk cabbage is six inches high. The river was up almost two feet, the opposite of last year. No trace of the long patches of lizard's tail that bloomed along the banks in July.

1987: Covered Bridge: Skunk cabbage up, all of second spring's growth steady. Flock of ducks on the river. Some new wild rose leaves have sprouted.

1988: Paperwhites, which started growing November 22nd, are in full bloom now. Amaryllis, watered on the 13th, is just beginning to open. All the Christmas cacti are in full bloom. Greenhouse tomatoes are coming in steadily. Knuckles of rhubarb are up in the garden, kale continuing to grow in the warmest fall I remember. Second spring everywhere in the woods. Cardinal sang at 10:00 a.m.

1989: Geese fly over the house, honking at 11:58 a.m., also at about 3:00, again at sundown.

1991: I was measuring things this afternoon, and came to the leaf pile. I had waded through it at the end of October, all the leaves from the yard up to my waist; they've settled a little since then, a foot or so in just a month; by spring, they'll be flat and dense, full of night crawlers, ready to dig under.

1997: To Canton in northern Ohio and back today. Snow blowing hard, it was a real winter day, gusty and bitter, temperatures in the 20s, sky slate gray, only a minute or so in the afternoon when the sun was visible. The snow was heavy and wet, sticking to the ground as we went walking around in Zoar. The floors of the stores and houses we visited had puddles and stains from everyone’s boots. As we went down one street, Jeni found a worm lying out on the ground; it was dead, but we couldn’t decide how or why it had been out on such a cold day.

1998: The last Osage leaves came down today; I’ll have to rake one more time in the back yard.

1999: By the wood stove in the greenhouse, the Christmas cacti are all coming in, the pale pink ones completely open, the darker colors not far behind. All the geraniums are blooming, tomatoes are ripening.

2002: Pond half frozen in this bitter early winter. Sweet Cicely seed pods: sharp black crescents above the snow. Bearded thistles, sagging, teasel strong and stiff, collapsing angelica, hollow leaning wingstem, its leaves twisted, tight around its stalks. Asters and ironweed tufts coming undone. River still open, some ice in the sloughs.

2005: Deep freeze settling over the region. The pond is three-fourths frozen over. The starlings no longer cackle in the trees along the alley. No robins seen. The oakleaf hydrangea leaves have curled and blackened in the cold, lows in the single digits. Camel cricket found in the laundry room this evening.

2006: Daytona Beach to Miami Beach, Florida. A new cold wave has moved down across the Midwest deep into the South, Jekyll Island having a high of only 46 on Friday. The drive to Miami revealed more of the retreat from autumn, more green deciduous trees, sweet gums, maples, oaks, fewer clumps of mistletoe visible in bare branches, summer and the tropics reasserting themselves from the Caribbean, blending with the end of the old year, foretelling the changes that will reach Georgia in February. Here in Miami Beach, weeds and shrubs are in flower, but less exuberantly than I saw on our trip to Key West last year. The egrets we usually see at Jekyll in the early spring are now in central and southern Florida.

Ah, soon on field and hill
The wind shall whistle chill.

George Arnold

December 7th
The 341st Day of the Year

You can see things better in the winter. You can see the shapes of the trees better, like how the oaks are different from the maples. And the form of the garden here, the way the snow will melt on the ground, but stay white on the path and bricks.

Frances Hurie

Sunrise/set: 7:43/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 27 minutes
Average High/Low: 42/27 Average Temperature: 34
Record High: 67 - 1892 Record Low: - 1 - 1977

Weather
Today's high temperatures are in the 50s thirty percent of the years, in the 40s another 30 percent, in the 30s twenty-five percent, 15 percent in the 20s or teens. Between today and the 21st of January, a high temperature above 69 has not been recorded in Yellow Springs. The sky is completely overcast 45 percent of the time, and chances for rain are 30 percent, for snow five to ten percent. The 16-week snow period begins for Ohio within the next seven days, with frozen precipitation up to four inches recorded in the Dayton area seven years in ten within the next week.

Natural Calendar
The coming week is a pivotal period during which the night lengthens by only three minutes. This is the first time that the day has shortened so slowly since the middle of July.

Daybook
1984: After five days of winter, fierce temperatures, six inches of snow, the pear leaves still hold on, brown and almost full. Beech and forsythia leaves continue in patches.

1985: Broccoli, horseradish and rhubarb killed off by several days of weather in the teens. Deep green parsley and dusky-leafed thyme still alive under their mulch. All the leaves finally came down from Becky's white birch.

1986: Cardinal sings 8:31 a.m. then silent. Sparrow hawk seen along Grinnell Road.

1987: Sparrows loud in the bare forsythia off and on through the day.

1992: Cardinal sings at 8:20 a.m. in the snow. Sage still fully green and fragrant downtown.

1997: A gentle, damp winter day, maybe two inches of snow on the ground from yesterday’s storm. The temperature was in the middle 30s this afternoon. As I walked, I could open my coat, even though my feet got cold in the wet mud and grass. The wind was down, and the sky rolled by in broad bands of pastel grays, some lighter, some darker. The snow was soft, good for snowballs or snowmen, but there was barely enough on the ground for either. Melting was spotty, leaving the ground dappled in white and brown. I wanted to name all the browns I saw, from the pale champagnes of the field grass, goldenrod and ironweed seed tufts, to the russets of the leaves of Japanese knotweed hanging to their stems, to the deep dark browns of the tree barks. And all were reflected in the river so quiet that it took each object and color without distortion, snow and chocolate and charcoal branches and the alternate bright and dull waves of sky.

1998: The warmest fall I remember ended today. Highs were only in the 40s, early winter approaching on schedule.

1999: Strei updates me from Fort Lauderdale: “I'm about ready to plant a vegetable garden on the flat roof part of my house because that's where there's most sun. My herb garden is now planted -- basil, oregano, nasturtiums, parsley – all are doing well. After
Hurricane Irene busted a number of my corn plants (dracaenas), I've managed to restart them as pups and they are now ready to be given as plant gifts for Christmas. This particular dracaena is about to bloom and gives off a wonderful scent in the evening and night hours. The mangos are in full bloom now and will produce fruit for harvest in late June through August. My grapefruit have really put out this year. My red ruby seedless variety tree has about 150 grapefruit on it, and they'll be ready to eat next week and through February. My navel oranges are doing so-so, only about 50 on the tree.”

2000: Camel-back cricket in the hallway, 8:45 p.m.

2003: Grackles still cackling in the village trees. The downtown pears and the Dayton Street beech still hold on to a few leaves.

2004: The small-flowered hollyhock continues to bloom in the mild days. Some green leaves remain on the butterfly bush. In the garden, the chard is still quite strong, but the broccoli plants I set out in August only have heads an inch or so across.

2007: More snow this morning, about five inches on the ground now. Brown, stiff Osage leaves spiral down and stick up in the snow. The new bird feeder by the bedroom window has attracted a purple finch, a female cardinal, and a chickadee. The sparrows are still at the front feeder. Oakleaf hydrangea leaves are darkening and curling from the cold. The pond is more than half frozen over. In the greenhouse, the Christmas cacti have pretty much completed their blooming, and all the tomatoes planted in July are ripe, the plants way past their best.

December 8th
The 342nd Day of the Year

Thou best of men and friends! We will create
A genuine summer in each other's breast,
And spite of this cold time and frozen fate,
Thaw us a warm seat to our rest.

Richard Lovelace

Sunrise/set: 7:44/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 26 minutes
Average High/Low: 41/26 Average Temperature: 3$
Record High: 68 - 1883 Record Low: - 3 - 1917

Weather
Early winter normally begins no later than this date, with the first of the season's 16 major cold fronts. By today, the possibility of snow is now 30 percent greater than it was at the end of November, and frozen precipitation falls more frequently on today and the 10th, than on any other days in the first two weeks of December.
The temperature distribution for the 8th: five percent of the highs are in the 60s, five percent in the 50s, thirty percent in the 40s, forty percent in the 30s, twenty percent in the 30s. The sun shines on four to five days out of ten. Rain comes ten percent of the days, snow on 20 percent. Freezing nighttime temperatures occur 85 percent of the nights, giving this date more dark cold than any other day so far since the end of summer.

Natural Calendar
The Geminid meteors (up to 50 shooting stars per minute) are visible near Castor and Pollux in the early morning hours during the second week of December.

Daybook
1982: Flocks of sparrows were working the goldenrod seeds at South Glen this afternoon.

1983: Two flocks of doves seen on Grinnell today.

1986: Giant flock of crows, hundreds of them, in the soybean fields along the highway east of Springfield.

1989: First junco seen at the bird feeder.

1993: South Glen: Flock of more than a dozen robins feeding on the green path to the Butterfly Preserve. Flying with them, a band of flickers. A great blue heron flew over along the river, the third seen so far this month.

1994: Walking back upstream toward the Covered Bridge about four this afternoon, the sun was down over the ridge above the riding center, and all the valley was shaded except for the far bend of the river. The sun was shining there, and the white sycamores framed that sunshine, making it seem like a kind of portal, a vision of home, a cave of light, magnetic and warm. The woods seemed complete to me, the golden branches not bare, not less than summer green. They were sufficient, glowing, welcoming. As I walked, I realized that, for that moment, I needed nothing else, that this was more than enough beauty for me, that I needed to seek no more, and that no matter what else might occur, whatever good or evil, that instant on the threshold of the trellis of branches at the bend of the river was as perfect as things would be. By the time I reached the river bend and walked out of the cold shade into the sun, there was no climax of fulfillment, no sudden realization of finding the rainbow's end, but I stood there, the sun in my face, letting it repeat to me all the things it had promised.

1997: The sky plain gray. At 8:45 a.m. crows circle the back trees. A cardinal and chickadee call on High Street. The snow from two days ago remains on the ground, mottled with holes of warmer spaces in the yard. The air is quiet and mild, temperature in the high 20s; it wraps around me lightly, touching my face with its cool firmness. By noon: an edge to the cold, sharper, piercing. The sky brightens a little, sun shows through, then a dull gray again. When I jogged downtown just after lunch, the bite remained in the air. This afternoon, the wind picked up, the barometer dropping, the day becoming more fluid. Tonight the grass has a coating of ice, gossamer-like, crisp. The half moon shows a little through the clouds. The barometer continues to fall.

1998: The morning chorus of starlings and sparrows seems strong to me this year; I walked out at nine o’clock to go to the doctor, and the air was full of birdsong.

2000: Camel-back cricket in the greenhouse this morning.

2005: Six inches of snow overnight, the roads slick. The last black Osage and mock orange leaves, torn from their branches by the storm, lie across the white yard. The temperature has not risen above freezing all month.

2006: Miami Beach to Brunswick, Georgia. Driving from temperatures of 70 degrees north through showers into the clear sky and cold of the Arctic high-pressure system that dominates the eastern half of the country. Wildflowers, white, yellow, violet noticed throughout the drive, the white most common. And so there is an overlap not only in the foliage of deciduous trees (in which autumn extends longer and longer down the peninsula of Florida until it is swallowed up in the summer of the tropics) but also in the flowering of weeds, the persistence of which pushes up against the end of the year’s northern perennial cycles, holding on at the edge of the winter until the earth tilts just enough to allow new cycles to begin and spread spring toward Canada once again. Within the ambivalent fields and woods between north and south, fall and winter, November and February, lie the markers of a remarkable frontier in both space and time, signatures of an elusive netherland from which the mysterious Christ of spring never fails to rise.

 

December 9th
The 343rd Day of the Year

There are afternoons in late autumn or early winter, during that recessive period of the year when the sun is low in the southern sky, when a special kind of light lies on the face of the familiar marshes. Snow has not yet fallen, or has thawed and gone, the land is brown, dun-colored, grey, with every vestige of the vernal seasons vanished save only for the tight buds on the maples. But in this very drabness...the sunlight lingers; it falls at an angle which invests every blade and seed-head with a life it has at no other time...it sheds a mellow tan effulgence, so that for a few hours of every afternoon, warm or cold, the meadows and the marshes seem endowed with a special kind of sentience in the soft sienna haze which holds to everything as were it the tangibility of sunlight itself.

August Derleth

Sunrise/set: 7:45/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 25 minutes
Average High/Low: 41/26 Average Temperature: 34
Record High: 65 - 1897 Record Low: - 7 - 1917

Weather
Today is one of the coldest and sunniest days of the first part of December, with highs remaining in the 20s more often than on any day so far this season (25 percent of the time). The absence of clouds does allow highs to warm into the 50s twenty percent of all the years; 40s happen 25 percent of the time, 30s thirty percent. Precipitation: 35 percent of the years, with odds 50/50 for snow or rain.

Natural Calendar
Almost every leaf has fallen by this time of December; even the most stubborn osage, pear and beech are down. Brown-barked river birches and white birches contrast with the black trunks of oaks and elms. Red-twigged dogwoods stand out against the snow. Ducks and gulls, the last of the migrants, leave the lower Midwest. Most second flowering of forsythia is finished. But new curly dock is often growing back in the wetlands. The freshest spears can be picked and used for salad greens, or sautéed with onions and maybe a small piece of bacon.

Daybook
1984: North Glen, snow on the ground, 50 degrees: Leafcup burned by severe cold, dock and dame’s rocket prostrate. Garlic mustard peeks out around the snow mounds. Buds of the maples prominent, seed wings still hanging from the box elders. Ice on the quiet sloughs.

1985: Covered Bridge, 45 degrees and sunny. I was out taking photographs along the river. New rose leaves and skunk cabbage have emerged. Starlings whistling. A honeybee found drowned in the backwaters. Sedum, sweet Cicely growing back. Heard what I thought was a whip-poor-will toward Middle Prairie. Crocus spears have come up by the garden wall.

1987: A cardinal sang at 8:45 this morning. At the mill habitat, second spring foliage holds its own in a mild, dry, fall and early winter. Even after a week of rain, the river has remained a foot below normal. I scouted for fishing holes, found the channel that I had missed at Far Hole during the summer. As I reached the dam, a beaver dove off the bank and swam upstream, its tail flapping up and down. Birds quiet in the woods, but at home, sparrows and grackles were chanting as though it were the middle of February.

1988: Lone robin seen at Middle Prairie, sitting near rose hips in the black and white field. The aloe plants flower in the greenhouse: a link to the tropics.

1997: Gray again today, the barometer continuing to fall steadily. Light mist of snow this morning. Intermittent chirping of a sparrow somewhere down the block, otherwise quiet - except for the cars on Dayton Street and the distant hum of the freeway traffic. This afternoon: melting, and the grass suddenly dominates the yard, which was covered with snow when I woke up. In the south garden, ice melts over the deeper end of the pond. Fog tonight. In the flashlight beam, my breath and the mist are the same.

2003: The river is high at the mill. Red honeysuckle berries hold on above the water.

2004: Turkey vultures still here, six reported along the bike path today.

2005: Large raccoon caught in the attic. How he entered is still a mystery.

2006: Brunswick, Georgia to Newport, Tennessee. I noticed more leaves on the oaks and sweet gums as we drove north today. Leafdrop is definitely not over along the coast, and I wonder at the narrow gap between fall and spring in a location such as Savannah or Jacksonville. Is it a month or maybe just a few weeks? Could it be as little as a few days? Does just a flickering space exist between seasons at the southern frontier, a miniscule, shadowy hinge of time, a fulcrum as small as a single plant or a single hour?

2007: The forsythia leaves are gone now, but the Japanese honeysuckle remain. Violet coralberries, orange bittersweet berries, red honeysuckle berries, blue privet berries stand out along the sidewalk toward Limestone Street. Rain began about ten o’clock, the day wet and dreary, birds waiting to feed until the weather turns, snow melting, patches of spring grass emerging in the lawn and along the roadsides. No goldfinches seen for several weeks. Tat in Madison says hers have disappeared, too.

December 10th
The 344th Day of the Year

Winter by the fire. Outside, the rain
Becomes mist, then fog, then sleet.
Great husbandsman, I think about your fields.
How well you make them, Lord.

Antonio Machado

Sunrise/set: 7:46/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 24 minutes
Average High/Low: 41/26 Average Temperature: 33
Record High: 67 - 1971 Record Low: - 9 - 1958

Weather
Today's average high temperature distribution: 50s thirty percent of the time, 40s just five percent, 30s forty-five percent, 20s twenty percent. Chances for precipitation are a little higher than yesterday's chances: 40 percent today, odds even for snow or rain. Clouds dominate the days more than half the time.

Natural Calendar
Around 10:00 p.m., the Little Dipper lies just a little north of the North Star, and the Big Dipper hugs the northeastern horizon. Due south, the gangly formations of Cetus Fornax and Eridanus wander along the tree line. Pegasus fills the west, Orion the east.

Daybook
1982: Forsythia is still blooming in Mrs. Lawson's yard.

1983: Only an occasional forsythia leaf holds on now. The winter garden broccoli and kale are still strong. Red raspberries keep some purple leaves.

1988: South Glen, cloudy, windy, 31 degrees. Goldenrod seeds are about three-fourths gone. Asters, wingstem too. Some of the fallen leaves have already turned winter gray. Coralberries still hold, red orange.

1997: It started to rain about 11:00 last night, and it seems like it has rained ever since. The morning is soft and wet, in the low 40s. A crow comes through before breakfast. The ice has dissolved in the pond, all the snow has disappeared around the edges. The ground is soggy and slippery. When the clouds cleared for a moment a little while ago, a cardinal sang in the west woods. In the garden, the kale is deteriorating quickly. I should pick the last leaves for supper. Mid morning: starlings whistle in the back trees. A chickadee chatters. Another cardinal sings: they like the gentle weather and the rain. I turn on the pond pump; the waterfall, finally unfrozen, begins to run. Another crow at 10:00. A few pansies still blue by the pond. November and December have been dark this year, only scattered sun since the 19th of last month.

2000: Susi’s spirea leaves hold at maybe half, rusted but hardy. Her osage leaves hang on too, but they are dark and dry. The ice and snow have broken the ironweed in her back yard.

2002: The ground has been frozen for several days now, and there has been ice on the pond ever since December 3rd. Only twittering sounds from the birds in the woods. The mid-November revival of cardinal song is over.

2003: Rain and silence today. Snow moves across Wisconsin. The barometer drops below 29.40 as the December11th cold front approaches. Only the Japanese honeysuckle leaves hold across the front hedge. Most honeysuckles down.

2004: A cardinal sang long and hard this morning a little after 7:30. In South Glen, the river was high after an all-day rain yesterday. Red euonymus berries lay about the ground. All the honeysuckle berries were gone, just a few of the pale green honeysuckle leaves left. No robins seen or heard. Moss was growing thick and sending up its delicate stalks. Patches of thin wild onions, covered with dew, glowed blue-green.

2007: Walking in the alley this morning about 9:30 with Bella, I heard the first cardinal that I’ve heard in a long time – one call, then the only sounds were the cackling of the starlings somewhere off towards downtown. This is another mild, gray day with rain before sunup and more melting. The snow of last week is almost gone, and the spring-like feeling of a few days ago has disappeared along with the first taste of thaw.
I was reading from Isaiah by the fire before breakfast, thought how if the Christian year is formed around pagan feasts and the ancient farm calendar, then the skeleton of the prehistoric year that has survived in Christian liturgy also reflects back upon its source, that Isaiah’s rapturous prophesies might today apply equally to a fantastic vision of summer as well as to the coming of a Savior. The newborn cycle of the sun, surrounded by the darkness of the brief days, will turn until it pushes back the night and ripens the land, bestowing a multicolored, many-tongued pentecost of birdsong, foliage and flowers and vegetables.

December 11th
The 345th Day of the Year

Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sunrise/set: 7:46/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 24 minutes
Average High/Low: 40/25 Average Temperature: 33
Record High: 65 - 1894 Record Low: - 8 - 1917

Weather
More than half the years, highs remain in the 30s; sometimes, they even fall to the 20s (five percent of the time). But a rare afternoon above 60 was recorded back in 1978, and 65 is the record high. Other benign possibilities: 15 percent chance for mild 50s and 15 percent for 40s. Skies are overcast 50 percent of the years, but snow falls only one year out of five, and rain only one in ten.

Natural Calendar
Seed companies have begun to sell their corn and soybeans for seed now, and discounts are often available to farmers for early purchases. The first garden catalogs have arrived at homes throughout the country.

Daybook
1988: River low at South Glen, no chubs or shiners bite. If I hadn't seen the schools of carp at Far Hole a few weeks ago, I would think the water dead.

1989: Geese flew over today.

1990: Cardinal sings: 3:00 p.m.

1991: Carolina wren eating seeds in the coreopsis.

1992: Gray skies since the end of October. Feeding the birds gives me some relief from my seasonal affective disorders; are the birds unaffected by the solar retreat? Or they simply know how to deal with it: be outside and eat!

1996: Downtown at 6:50 this morning: sky dark, warm wind from the south, the temperature above 50 degrees. When I got out of the car, all I could hear was the boisterous chatter of a huge flock of sparrows above me in the pear trees.

1997: More pale gray, the ninth gray day in a row. The air is crisp, though, sharpened by the arrival of a high-pressure system overnight. The wind is still now, and the land seems to be settling down solidly into winter.

2002: Sleet falling steadily today. The bamboo along the south wall droops down under the weight of the ice. A skunk was run over last night on Dayton-Yellow Springs Road.

2004: A pileated woodpecker called in the backyard this afternoon. When I went out to try to find it, it flew off toward Greg’s yard.

2007: Gray and mild, light mist: Walking this morning with Bella, I saw a small brown moth fluttering at the rugged bark of Mateo’s ancient elm tree. As I worked in the attic, another brown moth came beating at my light. Outside this afternoon, the high reached 64 degrees in the soft south wind.

December 12th
The 346th Day of the Year

The year seems to pause as the sun reaches to within a few minutes of solstice, but natural history continues to be the sum of observations. Since there is no limit to what a person might watch and record; stasis is only in the eye of the beholder. Like every other season, winter accumulates, is the product of the sensations it causes, is only what we see it to be, is all that we see it to be.

Casius Cajuvian

Sunrise/set: 7:47/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 23 minutes
Average High/Low: 40/25 Average Temperature: 33
Record High: 62 - 1972 Record Low: - 3 - 1960

Weather
Highs in the 50s occur 25 percent of the time. Forties come 20 percent, 30s thirty percent, twenties 25 percent. A morning below zero comes once every decade. Clouds cover the sky half the years. Chances for precipitation: 30 percent, with rain four times as common as snow.

Natural Calendar
Fallen leaves are matting down from the rain and snow now, freezing and thawing, their bright middle autumn colors gone, faded to a uniform, dull brown, some leaves being overgrown by the foliage of asters, ragwort, and hemlock.

Daybook
1983: One dandelion still blooms in the lawn. At South Glen, milkweed pods are black and empty, coming apart. Large hawk seen along Corry Street.

1985: The late summer plants brought inside have died: marigolds, zinnias, impatiens. Winter insects, the whiteflies, mealy bugs, some spider mites, have taken hold.

1987: Red-tailed hawk seen on the way to Wilberforce. Is it the same one I saw earlier in the month in 1984?

1989: Geese fly over 8:27 a.m. Forsythia leaves brown, many holding on. Japanese honeysuckle still deep green, almost like mistletoe.

1990: Covered Bridge habitat, 60 degrees, partly cloudy: The water was slow and clear, as low as I've seen it in winter. After a week of sunny, warm weather, hemlock was spreading up over the sycamore leaves. Skunk cabbage was green in the swamp. There was new columbine foliage on the cliff, and one miterwort all grown back. Asters were two inches long, and sedum gas thick. Ragwort had developed most quickly of all. The wind sounded like the ocean on the ridge above me. From the high path, the river was so bright winding through the valley. At home, a dandelion was flowering in the lawn. In the greenhouse, one tomato vine was at eight feet, fruits from all the plants coming in, as much as we can eat.

1993: Covered Bridge: Robins seen along the river. They must be planning to stay the winter.

1997: Yesterday to Springfield: Crows in the corn fields, in the trees and flying back and forth over the stores. There seems to be nothing unique that brings them to this urban setting, no unusual food supply or cover. Their convention must go back in history for hundreds or thousands of years. It always excites me to see them here. They reassure me that the world is still turning the way it should, in spite of the pollution, and global warming, overpopulation.
Today the barometer is up and the sun has finally broken through. The solid pale gray of the sky has been replaced by blue. Everything has changed.
But by two o’clock, the clouds return.

2002: Two sparrow hawks seen on the wires near Archbold, a hundred miles north of Yellow Springs.

2007: Crows pass through after sunrise. Starlings watch the neighborhood from Don’s tree. Sparrows cluster in the forsythia bushes and wait for me to feed them.

December 13th
The 347th Day of the Year

Now groane the Zephers;
Poplars shudder, naked
Like the Ears of Asses
Prophesying Storms and Snow.
Now Beasties roll about
And frolick in the Face
of gloomy Times!

Columenus

Sunrise/set: 7:48/5:10 Day's Length: 9 hours 22 minutes
Average High/Low: 40/25 Average Temperature: 32
Record High: 66 - 1901 Record Low: - 6 - 1960

Weather
Five percent of December 13ths are in the 50s, twenty-five percent in the 40s, fifty percent in the 30s, twenty percent in the teens. Precipitation, frequently in the form of snow, occurs 30 percent of the time. Skies are clear to partly cloudy 55 percent of the days. Lows drop below freezing all but 20 percent of the nights.

Natural Calendar
Today is the last day on which the sunset is the earliest of the year in Yellow Springs. And between today and January 3rd, normal average temperatures drop one degree every four days instead of one degree every three, starting a reversal of the rapid onset of winter cold. The averages remain steady throughout most of the year’s first month; on January 28th they begin to rise.

Daybook
1982: Ice has formed at the edges of Massey Creek, and the Little Miami. Grinnell swamp is frozen over.

1984: Trip east to Washington DC: landscape uniform, and gray skies throughout the drive.

1989: Early winter continues with a jerky but steady motion, getting gradually stronger since the 8th.

1992: Cardinal sings at 8:35 a.m. Grayness for weeks now, bleak wet weather; even the barometric high of 30.42 today produces no sun, and I feel an oppression, the sky too low, pushing down on top of me.

1995: All the bittersweet hulls have fallen now from the vine on High Street; the orange. berries still hold ten feet or so above the sidewalk.

1997: The sun has come out all the way now, and the wind is steady from the northwest, cumulus racing across the sky, low and tattered. I feel exhilarated, caught in the tide of this movement. At the same time, I feel unprepared, unused to so much sun and the absence of the dark clouds. But my lack of preparation makes no difference later in the day: the sky becomes gray again by noon, stays overcast through the night.

1999: Around the yard, the leaves are matting down, their familiar shapes dissolving into the grass. I can’t tell apples from white mulberries, or osage orange from mock orange. The box elders have broken down completely, not a trace of them left. Instead of shedding the rain, now the leaves accept it, porous, allowing the season. Ferns, prostrate, cover and mulch the hostas.

2004: One buzzard sighting reported by Jean today.

2005: Bright sun and cold: A cardinal sang as I walked out the back door this morning at 9:30.

2006: Cardinal at 7:25 this morning. Under the bird feeders, a few snowdrops pushing out of the ground have been trampled and shredded by the sparrows.

2007: Many bittersweet hulls and berries hold to their branches along Limestone Street.

 

December 14th
The 348th Day of the Year

Then for the teeming, quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!

Walt Whitman

Sunrise/set: 7:49/5:11 Day's Length: 9 hours 22 minutes
Average High/Low: 40/25 Average Temperature: 32
Record High: 66 - 1901 Record Low: - 15 - 1898

Weather
Today’s high temperature distribution: five percent chance for 60s, five percent for 50s, thirty percent for 40s, forty percent for 30s, ten percent for 20s, ten percent for teens. Double-digit below-zero morning temperatures enter the southwestern Ohio record books, but even single-digit below-zero dawns are rare, coming only five percent of the years. On this date, rain falls 20 percent of the days, snow just five percent.

Natural Calendar
Today is the sunset pivot day for spring in Yellow Springs: beginning this evening, the sun goes down one minute later for the first time since July 2nd. Also on the 14th, the Halcyon Days begin, a traditional two-week period of calm before the turbulence of winter. According to Greek legend, the halcyon (kingfisher) built its nest on the surface of the ocean and laid its eggs late in the fall. In order to ensure the brood would emerge safely, the bird calmed winds for a week before and after winter solstice.

Daybook
1986: Crows following the river, moving north across the Springfield highway. Blackbirds cackle and flutter around the yard as though it were spring. Geese heard flying over the village today.

1987: Patches of blue sky, then deep and lighter grays, broken apart in the rush of the wind, the front gate broken in the gusts, speckled starlings calmly working the lawn. Long flock of crows seen moving across the road along the old railroad bed north.

1992: This is the tenth day in a row without sun, and there have been almost no clear skies since the end of October. The air ic damp and sullen, carried by a huge high-pressure system that brings neither a change in temperature nor any clearing. Chopping wood, I found centipedes active under a large locust log.

1993: A pair of great blue herons flew over me upstream from the Covered Bridge this afternoon.

1997: Walking to church this morning, I watched large blotches of purple-gray in the clouds, mottling the overcast sky with giant pastel patches. On the way to Springfield this afternoon, I saw just one glimpse of sun and just a fragment of blue. Then at 9:20 this evening I went outside, the sky had cleared, the moon was full and bright!

2004: Blustery and cold with occasional snowbursts: Flocks of starlings feeding throughout the area as Jean and I did our Christmas shopping.

2005: I found a woolly bear caterpillar found crawling on the greenhouse floor this morning.

2006: Gentle weather, clear skies and 40s before dawn, warming to the middle 50s through the afternoon. A cardinal sang at 7:22 this morning. When I went outside around 8:00, more cardinal song.

December 15th
The 349th Day of the Year

Arrives the snow, and driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides the hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm - house at the garden's end.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sunrise/set: 7:49/5:11 Day's Length: 9 hours 22 minutes
Average High/Low: 39/24 Average Temperature: 32
Record High: 63 - 1984 Record Low: - 10 - 1901

Weather
Highs in the 60s come five percent of the afternoons; 50s occur on ten percent, 40s on 35 percent, 30s on 40 percent, 20s on five percent, teens on five percent. Skies are cloudy half the time, and there is a ten-percent chance of a morning below zero. Snow falls one day in four, rain one in five. The deepest December cold spell in half a century began today in 1983. It lasted until the 31st. The following year, there were highs in the 60s on the 15th and 16th.

Natural Calendar
Local greenhouse workers are taking cuttings from mother plants for future stocks of varieties such as impatiens and geraniums. Preparations are also underway for the seeding of the earliest bedding plants.

Daybook
1984: Record high temperatures in the 60s. Walking north along the railroad tracks, I saw a flicker and a small flock of robins, a few forsythia flowers.

1986: Jacoby: Paths still green, second spring foliage strong. Ice along the brooks. Geese fly over in the late afternoon. Chubs take my bait, none caught.

1987: Storm, limbs down, sparrows singing in the howling wind.

1988: Rose hips seem to be thinning. How long do they last?

1991: Large flock of crows crosses the highway at the railroad tracks.

1992: Jacoby Swamp, 55 degrees: Skunk cabbage a hand high but not open. Some of the hillsides green with garlic mustard. Long, flushed moss on fallen branches, and blue in the streams from the sky, the flashing of sunlight on the water. Crows over the ridge, and chickadees and wrens chattering ahead of me in the swamp. A startled deer in the cattail tangle goes crashing toward the river. One winter robin whinny. The pure springs that wander through the bottoms are adorned with cress, dock, ragwort, buttercup and the brightest grass: oases of color and sound, never overcome by winter, never browned or dulled, almost never silenced. Water striders in the holding ponds above the river, half a dozen ruling an inland sea 8 by 25 feet full of cress, fallen leaves, and algae, surrounded by moss and foliage of sweet rockets, asters, and miterwort. Below the pool, where the water escapes, there is a wide and deep line of cress, like an artery of spring. Barberry has brilliant red berries. One tan moth flies across the brook down into valley. Clump of orange fungi on the side of a dead tree. A little further down the path, a nut-brown button type toadstool with a short stem, growing from a rotten log. Thimble plant seeds have disappeared here. Staghorns still hold, blood red, and some pine cones.

1993: Witch hazel still blooming along Dayton Street, no change from a month ago. The red crabapples are still as strong as when their leaves came down. Flowering kale doing fine even after temperatures down to 15 degrees.

1997: Finally clear skies. The moon setting at dawn. The sun rising orange in the southeast, the horizon clean, cloudless. Out on the freeway, the beige grass, dull under the gray skies of last week, is tinted gold, all the browns of the fields made richer and deeper by the winter sunlight, the red buds on the maples glowing, the yellow willows shining. Hazy gray-blue horizon over the city. Geese flew over at 2:10 p.m. as I was writing this daybook entry.

2005: In the middle of an all-day snow, a fly emerged from somewhere in the house, landed on my computer screen at 2:22 p.m.

2006: Bella and I walked through the alley to the sound of starlings in the trees down the block.

2007: No starlings in the alley this morning, but a flock of crows flew over at about a quarter to eight. A major storm system is moving across the Midwest today – we already have three inches on the ground at noon, and the snow is expected to continue through tomorrow. Oklahoma and Missouri were shut down last week by ice storms, and they are getting hit again. Tat says Madison, Wisconsin has 21 inches of snow on the ground. By evening, we have a break in the storm, and the snow has turned to slush. More snow is due after midnight, lasting until mid morning. Then cold. One striped-breasted song sparrow seen beneath the feeder today.