November 16th
The 320th Day of the Year

He comes, -- comes, -- The Frost Spirit comes!
let us meet him as we may,
And turn with the light of the parlor-fire
his evil power away....

John Greenleaf Whittier

Sunrise/set: 7:21/5:18 Day's Length: 9 hours 57 minutes
Average High/Low: 50/34 Average Temperature: 42
Record High: 73 - 1930 Record Low: 8 - 1883

Weather
Chances for precipitation drop from yesterday’s 60 percent down to 30 percent, and the sun shines half of the days in my record. Temperatures reach the 70s five percent of the years, are in the 60s ten percent, 50s forty percent, 40s twenty percent, 30s twenty-five percent. Snow falls once in a decade. Lows in the single digits become a possibility, but lows still remain above freezing a little more than half the time.

Natural Calendar
This week, the silver maples and the oaks thin out. Forsythia turns deep red and gold from frost. Poplars shrivel. I can count the magnolia leaves left. Most mock orange leaves and most of the lilacs are gone. Half the ginkgo seeds hang on above the golden skirt of their fallen foliage. The beeches and pears and willows weaken. Osage fruits are almost all down, stand out chartreuse, at random, in the tangle of the undergrowth. Orange bittersweet is open there. Pink coralberries are glowing.
But November still retains enough of summer’s momentum to hold off early winter this week. The paths of South Glen stay bright green against the dull fields. Geese still fly back and forth between farm ponds. Starlings are still gathering in the woodlots. Late flocks of bluebirds pass through the Glen. Lawns have grown since their October cuttings, can be long and thick under and around the fallen leaves.

Daybook
1983: Oaks seem older, darker, thinner. Forsythia turning gold, red, yellow. Osage losing more leaves. Poplars in the yard burned and shriveled from the cold. Mock orange keeps most of its leaves.

1984: Seven magnolia leaves left at the west wall. Some silver maples have almost all their leaves.

1985: Our cherry tree lost all its leaves overnight.

1986: Fishing at Sycamore Hole: bobwhites, starlings, flocks of geese. Full moon day: two chubs, two shiners caught, some carp biting.

1987: Sycamore Hole: two chubs at 5:15, warm 60-degree afternoon, some carp biting too.

1988: Violets still blooming along Corry Street. Cardinals sing in the 60-degree morning, wind and rain.

1992: Mums damaged now by snow and lows in the lower 20s. Honeysuckle leaves three-fourths fallen. Most oaks gone. Most mock orange gone, a few last lilac leaves hang on.

1994: No hard freeze yet. Information I have from the Xenia weather station suggests that a killing frost has occurred by the third week of November better than 98 percent of the time. November 25th is the latest date for such frost in central Ohio, and if we can get past the cold fronts of the 18th and the 24th, we'll exceed that date maybe by as much as five to ten days.

1997: No birds at all this morning, not even crows. A dusting of snow on the ground today; I raked the yard a little bit anyway, the leaves wet but crisp from the cold. Collars set around the roses. In the garden, kale, cabbage and chard have survived the gray and cold. A few new weeds have sprouted here and there. This afternoon, a fly was trying to get out of the greenhouse.

1998: Poplars and lilacs hold at about a third. Crows quieter the past two weeks.

1999: Today I read back over the mid-March daybook, and I imagine spring and myself there.

2001: In the late autumn rain, I watch the apple tree that stands outside my back door. The tree has become a gnomon for me, a measure of the seasons and years. It has grown here for almost a century, and now it’s dying.
The rain is slow and soft. At the base of the tree, the fallen apples have decayed. The yellow jackets and the bumblebees that loved them are gone. Hostas in the apple garden are tawny, seed pods brittle and empty.
To my right, the locust and the box elder are bare, and the white mulberry is yellowing. On my left, the Osage is gold, fruits down on the woodpile. Honeysuckles are weakening all around the yard, showing their red berries. In front of them, the asters from September are gone, and the ironweed, butterfly bush, summer lilies, blue iris, tulips, daffodils.
Cars hiss by on Dayton Street. A squirrel is chattering. Crows come to the woodlot west of my back door. I think about a long flock of blackbirds that flew over yesterday morning. Last night, I heard just one whistling cricket.
The full moon always sets through the arms of the apple tree, sometimes a little to the left, sometimes a little to the right. At winter solstice, the sun disappears below the horizon in its southern branches, at summer solstice in its northern branches, at March and September equinox dead center on the rotting trunk.

2002: In Dayton, the ginkgoes near the University of Dayton hold at half, even though the Yellow Springs ginkgoes fell on schedule.

2003: A loud cardinal interrupted my reading at 7:02 this morning. When I went out near 9:00, I could hear robins and grackles in the distance.

2005: First snowflakes of the year as a hard cold front cuts across the Midwest (tornadoes all across the Border States – the third or fourth such event this month). To Switzerland County: the hills were brown, freeway grass still quite green, honeysuckles thinning, yellow green below the bare canopy. A few white mulberry and Osage scattered here and there. Pear leaves still green and holding most places. One bedraggled ginkgo kept most of its leaves in Vevay. Bennington Road as green and glowing in the low, gray sky, the pastures bright and the roadsides promising April.

2007: More and more flocks of starlings seen as I drive to Dayton, large flocks, small flocks. Elephant ears finally burned by more intense frost last night.

November 17th
The 321st Day of the Year

If you are afflicted with melancholy at this season, go to the swamp and see the brave spears of skunk cabbage buds already advanced toward a new year.... See those green cabbage buds lifting the dry leaves in that watery and muddy place.... They see over the brown of winter's hill. They see another summer ahead.

Henry David Thoreau

Sunrise/set: 7:22/5:18 Day's Length: 9 hours 56 minutes
Average High/Low: 50/33 Average Temperature: 41
Record High: 78 - 1958 Record Low: 9 - 1959

Weather
Fifteen percent of the afternoons reach 60 degrees on this date in November, and 45 percent climb into the 50s. On the colder side, 40s occur 25 percent of the time, and 30s come 15 percent of the days. Rain falls 30 percent of the time, snow once in a decade. Lows reach below freezing about half of all the early mornings.

Natural Calendar
By the middle of November’s third week, the sun passes a declination of 18 degrees, and is now three-fourths of the way to winter solstice. Hercules and Aquila set before midnight. Cassiopeia is moving east around Polaris, and Sirius is visible at the tree line below Orion.

Daybook
1984: The last leaves fell from my magnolias at the west wall today.

1985: South Glen: Flock of bluebirds at butterfly preserve. According to my records, November 15th is the last departure date for bluebirds from Grand Lake, 100 miles north of here. Are these the last of the bluebirds? At home, early winter forsythia blossoms.

1988: A robin passes south through the yard. Forsythia thinning quickly to maybe a fourth of its summer foliage.

1989: White mulberry leaves fell all at once today after an inch and a half of rain, then cold north winds, snow. Forsythia hurt in 15 degree morning low. Osage leaves hold.

1990: The last white mulberry leaves came down last night in the rain. Forsythia foliage hold at maybe three fourths. Roses mulched today.

1991: Toward Dayton, starlings still flocking, huge numbers flying back and forth. Sparrows loud in the pear trees in Yellow Springs (leaves holding at about two thirds). Most of the ginkgo seeds hang on. Greens fading from lawns and pastures; there has been little rain this November, increasing cold.

1992: Beech almost gone on Dayton Street. I'm getting anxious for everything to be over, want the peace of winter, less change.

1993: The late maples on High Street came down this week. Bradford pears on Xenia Avenue are golden red, have just passed their prime and are beginning to fall, branches full of screeching sparrows. Dayton Street and Xenia Avenue are lined with bright red crab apples and hawthorn berries.

1994: Weeding in the strawberry beds, I found the purple deadnettle grown back to middle March levels, its foliage lush, but no buds yet.

1997: The pond froze over last night for the first time. The river was frozen at the edges too.

1998: Silver olives along the highway 80 or 90 percent gone, honeysuckles half gone and yellowing. Tree line bare except chocolate leaves of the oaks, and scattered maples.

1999: The last of the white mulberry leaves and the last of the red mulberry leaves came down today. The beech across the street: maybe a fourth left.

2000: Japanese maple at about a tenth of its foliage left, English oak at a third, beech at a fifth.

2002: The white mulberry leaves came down overnight. Across the landscape, only a few trees remain bright gold or red-orange. It is finally the middle of late fall.

2004: The beech on Dayton Street is full gold today. The white mulberry leaves in the back yard hang on at maybe ten or twenty percent; the sudden collapse of previous years did not occur this November.

2005: Deep freeze to 23 degrees this morning, and the remaining white mulberry leaves were all over the back yard this morning. The Osage are holding as of 8:00 a.m. In the afternoon, Osage leaves coming down. I dug some elephant ear bulbs, the ground not frozen yet.

2007: At the Glen art show, Chet, a man from Huber Heights, said that he had a rose-breasted nuthatch at his feeder last week, the only one he has ever had. That puts their passage or their autumn visit at about two and a half months so far. Another person talked about seeing a giant flock of crows along Dayton-Yellow Springs Road this morning. Mateo’s red mulberry is more than half fallen; mine along the south border has thinned, too. Janet’s redbud lost its foliage at least a week ago; the others in the yard, the younger, more sheltered trees, still keep most of theirs.

November 18th
The 322nd Day of the Year

O, I see life is not short but immeasurably long,
I henceforth tread the world chaste, temperate, an early riser,
a steady grower.

Walt Whitman

Sunrise/set: 7:23/5:17 Length of Day: 9 hours 54 minutes
Average High/Low: 49/33 Average Temperature: 41
Record High: 75 - 1930 Record Low: 13 - 1959

Weather
Highs reach 70 five percent of the time, climb into the 60s fifteen percent, into the 50s twenty percent, the 40s forty-five percent, the 30s fifteen percent, stay in the 20s five percent. Chances are good there will be no precipitation: the 18th is one of the driest of November days: rain just once or twice in a decade, with the same possibilities for snow. The sun shines two days in three, and frost strikes a little more than half of the mornings.

Natural Calendar
Along the Ohio River, tobacco stripping passes the halfway mark, preparation continuing for the opening of markets toward the end of the month. The corn and sugar beets are now all in, and the poinsettia crop is on the way north from Kentucky. Along the West Coast, the annual crab harvest is beginning as crawdads move into Louisiana rice ponds to feed on the remnants of the crop.

Daybook
1983: Grinnell Swamp: one white aster blooming by the roadside. A few Osage leaves left. Honeysuckle yellowing, red berries still prominent. Cress, grass, algae strong in the swamp, climbing bittersweet open, ferns bright, nestled with lichens, some new waterleaf, thimble plant puffed up and losing its seeds, a “walking fern” noticed bright green on the upper path rocks.

1985: Geese fly over at 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.

1986: First juncos seen.

1989: All leaves from the south poplar gone. Two blossoms open on the white Christmas cactus.

1990: Walk down Polecat Road at dawn, violet sky streaked with pink and red contrails and cirrus. Frost across the fields, black cattle in the gray-blue pasture. Geese and ducks going over. Then, from the west side of the railroad tracks, two shots from a shotgun, and a goose, flying to the left of one formation, veered down into the trees, crying out when it struck the branches.

1991: Geese still fly over the village. Starlings are still gathering at the back trees. A late flock of bluebirds passed by on the 17th.

1992: Some pear trees in the village are brown and losing leaves, but others are full green, untouched by late fall.

1993: At South Glen, the paths stay green in spite of the cold, contrasting with pale brown fields beside them. Osage fruits are almost all down, stand out chartreuse, surreal, at random along the river walk. One coralberry bush glows pink. In the lower prairie, a patch of black-eyed Susans with gray foliage, petals gone, centers so black. Silver olive leaves have fallen in the past week here. Downtown, the pear leaves are coming down quickly in the sun.

1994: Jacoby Swamp: October and November have been mild and sunny this year, and the forest floor looks like spring. Garlic mustard has grown four or five inches tall, its leaves wide and bright. Chickweed has come back all along the paths, cress in the pools and streams. Grasses are returning. Skunk cabbage is showing all over the swamp, some plants even opening a little. Today's sun sets the new plants glowing like they glow in April, and the blue sky and the intense green, the fresh scent in the air, one yellow cabbage butterfly at the landing, all say that it's spring.

1997: Sparrow hawk on the phone line along Wilberforce-Clifton Road this afternoon. Neysa reports the sparrows still chatter every morning in the pears outside her apartment windows.

1998: To Springfield with Walt on the new bikepath north: First juncos seen, yellow-bellied woodpecker, flocks of robins. Wild cherries knocked to the path. Golden bittersweet berries showing high in a leafless tree; their vine had escaped the path builders. The blue sky full of sweeping cirrus, southwest wind strong in our faces coming back to Yellow Springs.

2001: A cardinal was singing when I walked out the back door at 7:03 this morning. Crows in the distance. Beeches more than half down on Dayton Street. Tonight one last whistling cricket in the hedge.

2003: When I walked Bella down High Street this morning, I found that bittersweet had fallen to the sidewalk. When I looked at the vine tangled above me in the maple tree, all the red berries were showing inside their wide-open hulls. In Washington Court House, quite a few dandelions were blooming. This afternoon as I went out to the woodshed, an Asian ladybug flew in front of me heading for the honeysuckles.

2004: The rest of the crocus planted today in the east garden. Elephant ears dug from the far west garden.

2005: Hard frost yesterday and this morning. Bittersweet hulls on the sidewalk, white exteriors of euonymus berries splitting, revealing the orange cores. Lettuce, rhubarb and comfrey prostrate in the cold. Hydrangea and mock orange leaves curled and blackened. Ice on half the pond. Beech tree on Dayton Street and Jerry and Lees sweet gum are both about three-fourths gone. Dahlia bulbs dug today.

2006: Cleaning her closet, Jeanie found a family of camel crickets, two large and four small ones, living in her empty wastebasket. When she picked up the basket, the largest one jumped onto her sweater as though s/he were defending the family.

2007: Walking through the alley with Bella this morning about 9:15, I came across a small flock of starlings in the honeysuckle bushes, and several of the tall trees held larger groups of birds than usual. All but three of the Limestone Street black walnuts have fallen. All the leaves have come down from the trumpet vine, following the season of honeysuckle leafdrop.
Thirty years ago, most turkey vultures left the Glen by the first week of November. Some years since then, especially in the 21st century, the vultures have been seen throughout the winter. Local naturalist Ruby Nicholson sent me this observation on the buzzards of 2007:
“At 4:15 p.m., November 18, I was on President Street near Corey. Nearby was a tree covered with buzzards. I began counting on the east side of the tree and ending on the west: 68 and the critters were still coming in when I left. One hour later, only three remained. I feel sure they gathered at this place to take off on migration.”

November 19th
The 323rd Day of the Year

When after climbing the little winding lane up the hillside, I came out onto the open at the top, I could hardly realize how good it was to be out in the woods again, after months of denial. A dead weed, virgin’s bower seeds with a little puff of snow on each cluster, how beautiful. I looked up into the vast gray sky, which was luminous with invisible sunlight behind the clouds, and felt: I am home again—this is mine.

Charles Burchfield

Sunrise/set: 7:24/5:16 Day's Length: 9 hours 52 minutes
Average High/Low: 49/33 Average Temperature: 41
Record High: 75 - 1930 Record Low: 12 - 1914

Weather
Today’s highs: chances for 70s five percent, 60s thirty percent, 50s twenty percent, 40s thirty percent, 30s fifteen percent. Mornings below freezing occur about half the time. Rain occurs one day in four; snow is rare. The sun shines three quarters of the days.

Natural Calendar
With pasture growth slowed or stopped by the cold, many farmers are feeding hay to livestock. Throughout the northern half of the United States, fall tillage in field and garden, which often helps control insects and improve soil structure, is ending before the onset of more inclement weather.

Daybook
1982: Columbines are almost gone at the Cascades. Willows keep half their leaves. Water striders are still out. All oak leaves are down here. Hepatica and ginger foliage are brown from frost. Wild onion is growing strong in the alleys. Winter wheat a couple of inches tall in the old cornfields – patches of green in the otherwise beige landscape. Asparagus stalks have lost their summer color.

1983: On a warm, 65-degree day, starlings sing, two daddy longlegs lie together against the cedar siding on the west wall of the house. Geese fly over in the late afternoon. Birch and willow retain yellowing leaves. Catalpas are finally gone. Most raspberry leaves have withered. Motherwort still strong, comfrey has died back. A third of the Osage leaves left. Most honeysuckles in the yard are bare, but in the woods they're still holding on. Pussy willow still has half its leaves.

1988: Starlings filled the morning trees. Geese went over the house three times today. First orange Christmas cactus bloomed.

1990: First aloe flower opened today.

1995: Mild today after cold and snow. Craneflies spin in the afternoon sun. Starlings cluck in the trees. A cardinal sings off and on. I dug up one of the old strawberry beds for garlic planting.

1997: Crows pass through at 8:10 a.m., 2:20 p.m., 3:40 p.m. Osage leaves finally all came down today. Honeysuckles seven-eighths gone. At South Glen, time for tufts of ironweed and thimble plant, goldenrod, zigzag goldenrod, milkweed, cattails.

1999: Another perfect morning, mild, with high cirrus; the world here is so quiet, no birds, no crickets. This afternoon, one cardinal song about 1:30. Starlings seen flocking at 3:30. In the Caribbean, a late hurricane, Lenny, moves in a strange once-in-a-century pattern from west to east, laying waste the central islands.

2001: My late yellow maple is finally shedding today. At school, all the white oaks are suddenly collapsing, one maybe nine-tenths down, the other about two-thirds. With the rain and then frost, the high white mulberry leaves in the yard (which had held on longer than the lower leaves) all collapsed. Ladybug at my window, one seen on the woodpile yesterday. Honeysuckle golden now across the farm landscape, a new season of gold, gift of the mild November. Silver olives thin out.

2004: A ginkgo on Dayton Street still holds its leaves, and the Dayton-Street beech is still full gold. Downtown, the pear foliage is red and starting to thin out. The sweet gum across the street holds at maybe 20 percent. Mild days continue to grace this November.

 

November 20th
The 324th Day of the Year

Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed as former things grow old.

Robert Herrick

Sunrise/set: 7:25/5:16 Day's Length: 9 hours 51 minutes
Average High/Low: 48/32 Average Temperature: 40
Record High: 73 - 1931 Record Low: 11 - 1914

Weather
Chances for snow are 15 percent, for rain 35 percent, and the sun breaks through just 50 percent of the days. Highs are in the mild 60s on 30 percent of the afternoons, in the 50s twenty percent of the time, in the 40s twenty-five percent and in the 30s another 25 percent. Low temperatures remain above freezing half of the nights.

Natural Calendar
Opossums and raccoons increase their activity in warmer November evenings. Improvident woolly bear caterpillars, the latest of the year, hurry across the roads when the sun shines. Sparrows fight for seeds and territory. Crows congregate for winter a few miles north of town.

Daybook
1982: Despite all the cold, mums are still bright. Mallow, one pansy, some parsley, petunias, calendulas, alyssum, chard, broccoli, chives hold too; the kale is even growing a few new leaves. The roadside grass is mostly brown now, only patches of green. Seed heads of Queen Anne's lace bow to the ground. All but a handful of leaves gone from the tall Osage in back, and the mock orange, and the pussy willow. Some forsythia almost bare, others have half their leaves. Privets are still solid, but their leaves are a yellow-gray-green.

1983: Bee flying around in church this morning. Large fly in the house. On a drive into Dayton, I saw maples with more than half their foliage, also poplars. There was a marked difference between the partially clad city and the bare country.

1984: Petunias, calendula, alyssum, pansy survive 18-degree freeze this morning.

1988: Raspberry and black raspberry leaves almost all gone, also mock orange. Honeysuckle branches are bare, red berries thick. All the pear foliage on Xenia Avenue has come down in maybe five days. A few sweet gum leaves, yellow and red, holding. The yard grass is bright green like the pastures and winter wheat. Squirrels chatter in the morning, few birds. Tornadoes out of season destroyed towns in the South yesterday, and a week or so ago.

1989: Cardinal sings at dawn.

1990: South Glen: Bluebirds – the last flock coming through?

1991: Road kills increase in the mild, wet weather: three opossums in three days, rare this late in the month.

1992: South Glen, sun, middle 60s: Ironweed seeds half gone. At Far Hole, all the Osage fruits are down, leaves too. Cardinal sings on the other side of the woods off and on through my walk. Loud calls of a large pileated woodpecker. At the river’s edge, the water is rippled blue, black, green, and brown, tree branches tangled in reflections. One bluebird sighted. A tan moth, maybe an inch in wingspan fluttered from one clump of leaves to another like a grasshopper. Three dandelions seen along the way; they are like overwintering robins, stragglers showing up through the fall. One burst milkweed, dangling. At High Prairie: a field of goldenrod seeds covered with dew shining in the sun, fruit far more exotic than its flowers. A few small oaks hold here, chocolate brown. Moss has new sprouts on an old log. Banks of box elder seeds shimmering. Most wingstem seeds hold, but all are fragile. Burdock burs hold, strong. All but one or two shriveled staghorns are gone from the sumac, thistles bedraggled, most undone, scattered, foliage curled and shrunken like dried seaweed. Small brown spider in the leaves. Thimble plant unraveling. In the front garden, more crocus planted.

1995: After a very cold few weeks, the sun is shining, the temperature up into the low 50s. On the way home from Wilberforce, I saw three orange and black woolly-bear caterpillars crossing the road – today is the latest I've ever seen them. I planted the garlic patch this afternoon, about 150 square feet of space. Jean reports the crows are congregating west of Springfield, the earliest we've noticed them arrive.

1999: The New England aster leaves have yellowed, and some of their seed heads are tufting. A few poplar and lilac leaves hold on in the south border. The cold front of the 19th passed through last night, this morning clear and serene. First birdseed (thistles) put out today.

2000: All the white mulberry leaves are down. Ginkgo finally gone at school. Ice on the pond.

2002: Lil’s maple leaves have all withered, but many remain on their branches. Jerry and Lee’s sweet gum is bright yellow. In the south garden, one stella d’oro lily blooming. Two yellow roses and one pink achillea are open in the north garden.

2003: Jerry and Lee’s sweet gum has lost almost all its foliage, but is still one of the few trees along High Street to have any leaves at all. In the north garden along the wall, the purple scabiosa has withstood the hard freezes to outlast all the other summer flowers.

2004: Fragments of burning bush foliage remain here and there.

2007: Ginkgo leaves collapsed on Rachel’s tree two days ago; the larger ginkgoes along Xenia Avenue are about half down today. Red-gold pear, sweet gum and oak foliage is prominent throughout town and south into Wilmington. I saw a large flock of blackbirds or grackles yesterday on the way to Cedarville.

November 21st
The 325th Day of the Year

Much of the time, my life seems to be about relationships and security, about children, about performance, money, giving or taking, promotion, pleasure, approval, accumulation. When I look more closely, though, I find it's really about the sun and the moon, the flowers and the wind.

Paul Quel

Sunrise/set: 7:27/5:15 Day's Length: 9 hours, 48 minutes
Average High/Low: 48/32 Average Temperature: 40
Record High: 75 - 1934 Record Low: 12 - 1964

Weather
Chances for rain today are 30 percent, for snow five percent. Clouds give way to clear to partly clear conditions more than half of the time. Highs reach the 60s on 15 percent of the days, are in the 50s on 25 percent, in the 40s on 30 percent, the 30s on 25 percent, and only in the 20s on five percent of the afternoons. Nights below freezing come six years in a decade.

Natural Calendar
The last crickets die in the frost, and the evenings finally become completely silent. Deer rutting activity declines in Ohio, but flocks of starlings still cluck in the bare trees. Cardinals sing off and on throughout the day. Squirrels chatter.
The sun enters Sagittarius on the 21st, having traveled three-fourths of its way from autumn equinox to winter solstice. Two hours before midnight, the sky carries the forms of early winter: the Pleiades, Taurus and Orion are rising, the Milky Way cuts across the sky from east to west, Andromeda lies directly over Yellow Springs, and the Summer Triangle is setting over Dayton.

Daybook
1982: Bradford pears on Xenia Avenue still have their foliage, yellow and red. Small sugar maples by the old Carr greenhouse at the end of High Street still have their leaves.

1983: South Glen at sunset: Cardinals, doves, downy woodpeckers in the trees. All the leaves are gone except a few honeysuckles. Ginger, parsnip, nettle burned by the frost. Crane flies spinning through the black wingstem and the tufted goldenrod, catching the light of the orange sun.

1985: Pecan leaves all fall at once.

1986: Starlings seem to have left. They had been eating crab apples just a week ago. I took them for granted. I did hear a bobwhite calling, but the silence of winter seems to be setting in. A few honeysuckle leaves and berries left. No violets seen blooming in the woods. Rivers high and clear.

1990: Red crab apple fruit prominent along Dayton Street now. Bluebirds seen at South Glen, and the pear leaves begin to fall on Xenia Avenue. Cardinal sings at 2:00 p.m.

1993: Robins gone at South Glen, but an occasional call heard in town today. Yellow Osage leaves came down in the light wind today.

1997: The beech tree on Dayton Street is losing its golden brown leaves now.

1998: Gerry writes from Florida: “You asked what flowers are blooming. Besides orchids? Many many. The bougainvilleas (local Spanish spelling) are in full bloom (as they are almost year round); the pond lilies are just about to bloom; the tababulia trees have buds and will bloom in about a month... and there are so many more...Are the citrus ripening? Yes, my regular stock are -- ruby red grapefruit almost ready, and in another two weeks my mandarin and navel oranges will be ready and then in full production for three to four months. Some growers manage to put out citrus stock around the year, right through the summer heat too. Then there's fruit like my mango and avocado that produce in mid-late summer. I need to plant my radish and lettuce this week since this is the time for tender vegetables that will be harvestable in January and February.”

1999: In meditation class, the teacher told me told to follow the spaces between the sounds I heard. Now, in late November I might do just as well to follow the spaces between summer and winter. The windows look out onto the new geometry of the mulberry and the walnut branches. The openings define and name their borders. The straight, black street comes into the yard again, the hermitage barrier of forsythia and honeysuckles thinned. The sounds of the cars (and the sounds of time between the cars) become clear, unfiltered by foliage. I can see the edges of the rocks at the bottom of the pond now. The water hyacinths are gone. Pickerel plants and arrowhead plants, purple loosestrife, wild flag, water willow, water lily have all thinned to stalks, uncovering the fish. I haven’t raked the grass; green shows through, widens as the leaves decay. The flowers and weeds die back in the garden, revealing the soil again. The great blue hosta has left its leaves shriveled like snake skin, its last black seed ready fall. The gray fruit disappears from the New England asters, and their shiny calyces emerge. The phlox plants are empty, their pointed, lanky sepals curling.

2000: While I ate lunch in the truck with Buttercup, I watched a flock of finches working the sweet gum tree fruits, digging out the seeds from their hollows. Below them, juncos fed on what the finches wasted.

2001: Sycamores in Columbus mostly down, pears shedding in Xenia, chestnuts three-fourths bare, Susi’s late maple gone, most of the land in central Ohio plowed.

2003: I saw a small flock of vultures circling low over Grinnell Road on my way back from walking with Mike this morning. The temperature reached 60 degrees this afternoon. A fly was buzzing in the work shed.

2004: Crows call at 7:15 this morning. Betty Ross from the Raptor Center said she had seen a flock of crows attacking a black vulture last week. She added that crows never attack turkey vultures – and that black vultures haven’t been in this area until just the last year or two.

2006: Jerry and Lee’s sweet gum has lost almost all its leaves now.
Sundog seen in the west over Dayton this afternoon at 4:15.

2007: To Madison, Wisconsin today, beginning at 67 degrees, driving through hard rain for several hundred miles, ending in heavy snow and wind. A few hawks seen, a few small flocks of starlings. We left behind many pears, beeches, oaks, and even late maples, entering a countryside that became more and more empty the further past Indianapolis we drove. All but the broad-leafed Norway maples had fallen in Wisconsin. One burning bush had collapsed maybe a day or so before our arrival.

November 22nd
The 326th Day of the Year

The fields are cold at Jacoby swamp,
Brambles tangled in down and milkweed,
Blackberries gone to jam and brandy.

Sunrise/set: 7:28/5:14 Day's Length: 9 hours 46 minutes
Average High/Low: 48/32 Average Temperature: 40
Record High: 74 - 1900 Record Low: 8 - 1964

Weather
Highs in the 60s come ten percent of the afternoons. Fifties occur 40 percent of the time, 40s thirty percent of the time, 30s twenty percent. Half the days are cloudy, and half are partly sunny. Rain falls one day out of three, but snow almost never comes to Yellow Springs on this date.

The Week Ahead
The fourth week of November, the third week of late fall, is the stark and windy week that marks the decline of average highs below 50 degrees throughout the region, and the end to any reasonable chance of a day above 70. Nights below zero even become possible now. The sixth cold front of the month, arriving around the 24th, often brings rain on the 23rd (there is a 50 percent chance of that). The seventh high-pressure system generally arrives on November 28th, preceded by rain 70 percent of the time on the 27th – the 27th is the wettest day in the month’s weather history. November 28th, 29th, and 30th have the best odds of the month for snow. After the 25th, the percentage of cloudy days almost doubles over the average for the rest of November.

Natural Calendar
The final rites of fall include a chronology of the last leaves and fruits. Major losses occur on beeches and pears as autumn ends. Sometimes oaks are the holdouts, sometimes forsythia or a hardy honeysuckle. Sometimes sweet gums and poplars keep a few leaves this late in the year; sometimes protected oak-leaf hydrangeas, Osage, mock orange or lilacs outlast all the other trees and shrubs.
Near the corner of Limestone and High Streets, bittersweet continues to fall to the sidewalk. Along Dayton Street, yellow witch hazel flowers are shriveling. Privets are bare, their blue berries revealed. Euonymus fruits are losing their white outer shells, orange cores unveiled by the cold.
New England aster and stonecrop foliage turned yellow in early November; now the plants are shedding. Late garden lettuce and the autumn growth of rhubarb have withered. Hosta leaves have collapsed into the remnants of maples, ginkgoes and white mulberries. The gooseneck turns chocolate brown. Most all the seeds are gone from milkweed pods; just a few wisps of down cling to their shells. Fragile pokeweed stems have exploded in the frost. The last roses have been frozen by nights in the teens.
Bringing Indian Summer to a close, the weather at November’s end is often the cloudiest and wettest since April. Below-zero lows now enter the realm of possibility. Normal Yellow Springs highs drop from 46 to 44 between November 26 and December 2, the first time since March 4 that they have reached that level. Average morning temperatures move from 31 to 28, the first time since March 13 that normal lows have dropped below 30 degrees.
And the day becomes shorter by seven minutes during the week ahead, the last time this year that the day loses so much time. Sunset is the earliest of the year on the 26th; it will remain at that time until December 13.

Daybook
1982: Tan moth fluttering in the twilight by the garden wall.

1983: Clifton Gorge: Viburnum thinning. Huge blackberry canes only have a few red-orange leaves. Hepatica leaves are purple from the frost. Some small sedum is growing back on the woods floor. A flock of geese went over at 3:15 this afternoon, pointed south. Red staghorns still hold here, still red.

1985: All the Dayton Street beech leaves are gone.

1986: Cardinal sings off and on all morning.

1988: Sparrows chattering. Their conversations seem louder than in the summer, and more like spring territorial and mating disputes. Paperwhites started today, two inches protruding.

1989: Cardinal sings at 7:14, fourteen minutes before sunrise. Starlings in my ginkgo all day cackling. Aloe has almost completed its blooming in the greenhouse.

1992: Aloe about finished flowering in the greenhouse.

1994: First sparrow hawk of the year seen diving into the grass along the freeway. At Springfield, the crows are everywhere.

1999: It seems everything is coming to a head now in spite of this warm, September-like weather. Along the bike path, the garlic mustard fills the ditches, sweet rocket foliage is fat here and there, soft mullein plants spread their basal leaves, hemlock is lush and bushy. In town, there are still some yellow mums. In the greenhouse, the first winter tomatoes are ripening. On the way to Dayton, I saw one yard full of dandelion heads gone to seed, an April sight. All through the city streets, the pears are coming down, the beeches too (here in Yellow Springs, the beech on Dayton Street is seven-eighths down). Honeysuckles are still yellow green and thinning, accentuating the fresh grass with their spring-like glow. In the afternoon, I mowed the lawn for the last time, mulched the leaves into the ground. The smell was an April and May smell. Birds were at the feeder: three chickadees, a pair of wrens, a purple finch. Geese flew over town in a long line maybe half an hour past sundown; it was just light enough to see them. The newspaper reported wild turkeys wandering through yards, “escaping from the Thanksgiving hunt.” This is the first time I’ve heard of the wild turkeys making it into town since they were planted here a decade or so ago well downstream from Yellow Springs.

2000: Sparrow hawk seen on the way to Fairborn.

2001: North to Wisconsin: Willows yellow at Indianapolis. Grass mixed, tan to green like late March. Some lawns, pastures bright. Silver olives down, fragments like glitter, specs of pale green. Fields alternating rusty tan to brown, to shades of beige. Flock of gulls in a corn field.

2002: I found a woolly-bear caterpillar crawling along on the living room rug this evening.

2003: A cardinal and a wren sang at 7:01 this morning. Then silence. Lee and Jerry’s sweet gum is down to maybe a fifth of its leaves. Mild 60s today – an Asian lady beetle landed on the back door as I came in from the yard. A mosquito flew around me this evening when I was watching television.

2004: The beech on Dayton Street is deep rust. Jerry and Lee’s sweet gum has lost all but maybe five to ten percent of its leaves. Downtown, and all along Xenia Avenue, the pear trees are red and gold; shedding has begun. In Washington Court House, dandelion seed heads are common in the field across from school, the warm weather of the past week having brought a surge in flowering.

2006: This morning as I was reading by the fire, a medium-sized camel cricket came walking by and proceeded to go under the wood stove. The Osage leaves have come down in the last week; the forsythia, lilac and mock orange foliage is almost gone. The New England aster seed heads are all puffy and silver. I worked outside stacking scrap wood by the rose of Sharon hedge, was covered with a shower of fuzzy seeds when I bumped the branches. At the north end of the brick patio, another of the crocus we planted in September has bloomed, a purple one, fat, an inch or so across.

2007: Tat told me that her juncos stay the summer in Madison, only two hundred miles north of Yellow Springs. By her bird feeders, a witch hazel keeps its bright flowers in spite of the hard freeze.

November 23rd
The 327th Day of the Year

The winter wren is back, quick
Among the treeroots by the stream,
Feeding from stem to stone to stick,
And in his late return the rhyme
Of years again completes itself.

Wendell Berry

Sunrise/set: 7:29/5:14 Day's Length: 9 hours 45 minutes
Average High/Low: 47/31 Average Temperature: 39
Record High: 72 - 1931 Record Low: 13 - 1970

Weather
Today’s high temperature distribution: 60s on ten percent of the days, 50s on 30 percent, 40s on 45 percent, 30s on 15 percent. Skies are overcast two days out of three, rain falls half the time, and snow is unlikely. For the first time since March 20th, average low temperatures fall below freezing.

Natural Calendar
When the sun came into Sagittarius, the ancient Chinese marked “Stuffing Up Windows Time” or “Turning Jackets Time” in order to signal the advent of the coldest period of the year. Far to the west of Beijing, the 23rd of October was celebrated as St. Clement's Day, the traditional beginning of European winter during the Middle Ages. English children would go “clementing” in that era, sometimes singing verses like the following:

St Clement’s, St Clement’s comes once in a year
Apples and pears are very good cheer
Got no apples, money will do
Please to give us one of the two.

Here in Yellow Springs centuries later, trick-or-treating takes place a few weeks earlier than clementing used to occur, but the first major shift toward winter still happens at the end of November, accentuated on our calendars by Thanksgiving. Global warming or cooling aside, the northern half of Earth has retained the same approximate date for its end-of-the-year transition across millennia.
The cutting of corn and soybeans is almost always complete by now. The beeches on High Street and the pears downtown are gone, and the silver maples and the oaks thin out. Forsythia and spirea turn deep red and yellow from the frost. Tangled bittersweet is wide open along the fencerows. Bright pink coralberries shine through the undergrowth. Seed tufts of virgin’s bower complement tufts of milkweed, thimble plants and cattails.
Juncos have returned to the township. Bluebirds make their final passage through the Glen. Nourished by the great stands of honeysuckle throughout the area, robins linger to feed. Starlings whistle and wrens chatter at sunrise. Sparrow hawks become more common as November deepens. Finches work the sweet gum tree fruits, digging out the seeds from their hollows. Humans “stuff their windows” with plastic or modern thermal glass; they bring out their winter coats; they celebrate the harvest.

Daybook
1984: Forsythia bushes hold at half. Beech leaves start to fall. In Wisconsin, willow leaves persist, yellow-green.

1985: Geese fly over 7:54 a.m. Doves, juncos, a blue jay, and a cardinal join the sparrows at the feeder.

1989: Downtown pear foliage still red and full. Geese fly back and forth every day. Red-orange Christmas cactus is in full bloom, the white maybe a fourth.

1992: First junco at the feeder, another tan finch too, cardinal singing for a while at 8:00 this morning. Mock orange, lilac almost all gone, forsythia more than half fallen. Downtown pears hold at maybe two thirds. Housefly in the greenhouse. Red-orange Christmas cactus full bloom, and the white has five flowers open.

1994: Finally, three days before breaking a record, Yellow Springs experienced its first hard freeze of the fall, temperatures into the 20s. Many of the white mulberry leaves and the Osage near the shed had held on until last night, then with the cold, they all were down by morning.

1995: To Chicago: the trees bare throughout, even the willows and most of the oaks. No forsythia, only a few honeysuckle leaves left. Scattered flocks of pigeons and crows, a few geese, cross over the highway.

1997: Walking downtown, blustery afternoon, clouds and sun, wind from the northwest. Forsythia leaves were thinning, but one bush on Limestone Street was almost in full bloom (our bushes only had a single branch with blossoms). Up Dayton Street, the witch hazel was still in flower. Bittersweet berries holding along the sidewalk.

1999: First almost ripe tomatoes discovered at the west end of the greenhouse. They had been hidden by a red geranium. Outside it’s so warm that I have the back door open. I can hear the crows west of town. These are the shortest days of the year, twenty minutes from solstice, but there is so much sun and light it seems like summer. Cabbage butterfly looking for nectar in the South Garden at 1:45 this afternoon, the latest in the year I’ve ever seen one. Yellow jacket reported in town. Late this afternoon, I came across a long flock of blackbirds, perhaps a mile in length, following the freeway south.

2000: Crows at 7:11 a.m. Hosta leaves finally collapse after nights in the teens and twenties. Osage holds but burned.

2003: A cardinal at 7:04 a.m., sky partly cloudy, temperature in the 50s. Pear trees have most of their leaves, red and yellow, along Xenia Avenue. The Dayton Street beech only has its lower foliage, golden.

2004: Cardinals singing off and on throughout the morning, the skies gray, temperature mild in the 50s. Greg called this evening: he’s still watching the skunks come to his bird feeder.

2006: By today, almost all of the pale hulls of the bittersweet have fallen, leaving the bright orange berries.

2007: Jeanie and I went to my sister Tat’s house for a family get-together in Wisconsin, and we arrived the night before Thanksgiving just as the wind picked up and rain turned to heavy flakes of snow. By morning, the sky was clear and the air was sharp. The ground and rooftops were white, all the leaves down and covered from the storm.
Before breakfast, I went walking with Bella, our border collie. The sun had come up an hour before, and it was shining through the bare trees. Crows were calling from the bike path behind my sister’s house, a house that was only two blocks from where our parents had moved in the early 1960s.
I walked down the quiet Madison backstreet, surrounded by a sense of being completely at home. Something in the way the wind blew, some familiar scent or smell I couldn’t identify, carried me to a childhood state of comfort and belonging. I wondered for a moment why I had ever left the North, and then, of course, on second thought, all my early rebellion and my isolation came quickly back to mind.
Then, high above me, I heard sandhill cranes. I looked up to see them in a ragged formation maybe half a mile high, flying hard with a northwest tailwind into the sun and crying their rattling, trumpet calls. The adults and their offspring, having spent the summer in the northern wetlands, might have been heading toward Yellow Springs and toward wintering country in Florida and the Caribbean.
I walked a little further with Bella, and then I heard them again. This time, the cranes were in a perfect “V” and, it seemed to me, flying even higher and faster. They would certainly beat me to Ohio, I thought.
The migration of birds, especially the passage of great, loud flocks, always makes me restless to leave wherever I am, makes me homesick for somewhere else. That Thanksgiving morning, the cranes reminded me once again of why I left home, and why I go back, and that, even though I may be home, the journey never seems quite over.
***
Then some day here come the cranes
planing in from cloud or mist—sharp,
lonely spears, awkwardly graceful.

William Stafford, “Watching Sandhill Cranes”

November 24th
The 328th Day of the Year

Rain and wind gust.... The landscape was transformed. Only a touch of color remained here and there, the hills were austere and dark. Autumn was blown away like a shroud of dust, the earth was uncovered to the sky.

Harlan Hubbard

Sunrise/set: 7:30/5:13 Day's Length: 9 hours 43 minutes
Average High/Low: 47/31 Average Temperature: 39
Record High: 68 - 1931 Record Low: 3 - 1950

Weather
Today is cooler than the 23rd most years, with the arrival of the month's fifth major cold wave. Lows drop below freezing three nights out of four. Forty percent of the afternoons reach 50 degrees, 30 percent make the 40s, forty percent are in the 30s. Chances of rain diminish to only 25 percent, but flurries come once every two decades. There is a 50/50 chance for clouds.

Natural Calendar
Once in a while, patches of dandelions come into bloom. Wild onions and the garden garlic grow a bit when the weather is mild. Motherwort foliage is still strong. The grass along the freeways has turned pale, but winter wheat sometimes lengthens an inch or so, creating wide patches of green in the otherwise dormant landscape.

Daybook
1984: Silver maples leaves finally all withered from the cold.

1985: Geese fly over at 8:24 a.m.

1986: Cardinal singing at 7:10 a.m.

1993: In Chicago yesterday, most of the honeysuckle leaves were
gone. They are holding at maybe a fourth here. Forsythia leaves
are coming down quickly in front of the house. Caraway in full
bloom in the new fern bed. A giant dandelion found open beyond the butterfly preserve. A pileated woodpecker heard throughout my walk along the river, and sporadic robins, chickadees, cardinals.

1994: Walking upstream toward the covered bridge about four this afternoon: the sun had gone below the ridge behind me, and the valley was shaded except for the far bend of the river a few hundred yards ahead. The sun was shining there, and the white sycamores framed its brightness, making a kind of golden portal, an arch of light, inviting and warm. The November woods seemed complete to me then, the bare branches sufficient, glowing, welcoming, no longer less than summer green. As I walked, I realized that this was more than enough beauty for me, and that it brought me peace and a sense of fulfillment. When I reached the river bend and walked out of the cold shade into the sun, I stood facing the bright west. I was part of the doorway, gold and warm like the ground and the trees.

1995: This morning, outside my sister's home in suburban Chicago, I watched a flock of maybe two dozen crows circle a house several blocks away, then gather in a tree to make noise.

1997: Driving into Dayton today, I saw starlings flocking all along the highway. Snow last night, the second major covering of a half an inch.

2001: Wisconsin: Willows done here, patches of hardy staghorns and Johnson grass. Hard south wind and hard rain. Below Chicago, visibility low, racing stratus fractus, then a great slice of blue, maybe the center of the low, then into more low stratus. Toward Bloomington into the sun and southwest wind. Above the stratus come cumulus, small shattered patches of blue. In the deeper openings: wispy, gossamer cirrus, then layers of fractus and cumulus, stratus so low I felt I was among them. I was riding in a window of rapidly closing from the west on my right, the dark gray circling around in front of me, closing. Near LaSalle, I approached another break in the sky, could see up deep blue then turquoise. A flock of blackbirds on my right, shaggy grasses leaning in the wind, geese here and there feeding. Leaves appeared on the trees south of Bloomington, honeysuckles and willows. Then, east of Indianapolis, I drove into the edge of the cyclone, dull gray and light rain all the way into Ohio.

2002: Pear foliage collapsed today.

2004: As the Thanksgiving cold front approaches, my barometer has dropped to 29.18, the lowest I’ve ever seen it. The temperature is 61, the wind rising, cold 40s just a few miles to the north.

2007: Returning from Wisconsin, I found the white mulberry tree had dropped all its leaves, probably after the hard freeze on the 22nd, 23rd or maybe even this morning. The Osage by the shed was about half down, still falling. Seven large hawks counted on the way home, but only a couple small flocks of starlings.

November 25th
The 329th Day of the Year

The student and lover of nature has this advantage over people who gad up and down the world, seeking some novelty or excitement; he has only to stay at home and see the procession pass. The great globe swings around to him like a revolving showcase; the change of the seasons is like the passage of strange and new countries; the zones of the earth, with all their beauties and marvels, pass one's door, and linger long in the passing.

John Burroughs

Sunrise/set: 7:31/5:13 Day's Length: 9 hours 42 minutes
Average High/Low: 46/31 Average Temperature: 38
Record High: 71 - 1908 Record Low: 3 - 1950

Weather
Temperatures in the 60s return to Yellow springs 15 percent of the time, make it into the 50s forty percent of the time, into the 40s twenty percent, into the 30s twenty percent, and into the 20s five percent of the time. The sun shines at least a little six to seven years in ten, and rain falls four to five days in ten. This is the date for the latest recorded frost in central Ohio.

Natural Calendar
The Christmas tree harvest has begun in northeastern Ohio. Throughout the area, farmers are hauling manure, and some fall tillage is still taking place on dry afternoons. Tobacco stripping continues in the southern counties.

Daybook
1979: All the Osage leaves are finally down along King Street. All
the forsythia, mock orange and honeysuckle are gone too.

1981: All leaves gone from the trees.

1982: Chard and parsley finally hurt by frost. Comfrey prostrate, burned.

1984: South Glen swamp: No skunk cabbage found so far. Mint,
cress, dock, ragwort, garlic mustard, moneywort, sedum, ground
ivy growing along the water. Hazy skies, temperatures in the 50s,
it could be a day in March. A few oak leaves hang on, Norway
maples hold some foliage. As I went toward High Prairie, I saw a deer running along the stream below, an arrow in its shoulder.

1986: Opossums still active, still being run over on Grinnell Road. Chubs bite, but no carp. The mild days are becoming more rare, skies darker.

1988: A cardinal sings at 11:56 a.m., then cardinals keep calling all day at home and in the woods, highs coming into the 60s, crickets chirping along the river, moths and flies common in the preserve. Caraway is still flowering in the yard.

1990: In the 60-degree afternoon, bulb planting and mulching
completed. Daisies transplanted. Purple deadnettle was blooming along the
south wall, and a dandelion was open in the middle of the side
lawn. A cardinal sang around 3:00.

1992: Cardinal singing at 7:28 a.m., gray morning, light rain, 42
degrees. Pear foliage continues to deteriorate slowly, now down to maybe a third.

1994: Starlings in the downtown trees this afternoon, the pears keeping most of their leaves in this warm and sunny autumn.

1999: Bradford pears are down to maybe half, yellowish-maroon in color. Starlings flocking in a tree on Davis and High Streets this afternoon. Osage leaves in the back yard hang on at maybe ten percent, all a heavy, vulnerable gold. One sweet gum tree a few blocks away has quite a few of its red leaves left.

2001: In Columbus, my white oaks are almost completely gone, and the small black grapes have fallen (or been eaten) from around my window. Along the freeway, honeysuckle leaves are more than half shed. At Washington Court House, the pear trees are at least two-thirds down.

2007: The downtown pear leaves are red and about half fallen. All of the front honeysuckle leaves are down, and the forsythia have been hurt by the hard freezes of the past two nights. In the south window of the bedroom, one Asian ladybeetle looks for a crevice in which to spend the winter. I saw one last week, too.

November 26th
The 330th Day of the Year

The last red leaf is whirl'd away,
The rooks are blown about the skies.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Sunrise/set: 7:32/5:12 Day's Length: 9 hours 40 minutes
Average High/Low: 46/30 Average Temperature: 38
Record High: 70 - 1990 Record Low: 8 - 1930

Weather
As the final weather system of the month approaches Ohio, the 26th is one of the windiest and warmest days in late November. Temperatures reach 70 five percent of the time, the 60s thirty percent, and the 50s twenty percent. Cool 40s are recorded 25 percent of the afternoons; 30s come on 20 percent. Clouds keep out the sun one day in two; rain falls four days in a decade. Frost strikes only 25 percent of the years, the last time in the year when the incidence of freezing temperatures is so low.

Natural Calendar
The absence of leaves accentuates the gray tufts of ironweed, thimble plant, milkweed, and cattails. Fields of goldenrod heads glow in the sun, more exotic than when they were in flower. All but a few brown staghorns have fallen from the sumac. Thistles are bedraggled, most undone, foliage curled and shriveled. Box elder seeds shine in the frost.

Daybook
1982: No cabbageworms found on the kale.

1985: Waterleaf growing in the yard. White birch only a few
leaves left.

1986: All across the county, the trees are totally black, ready
for December. Downtown, the pears are losing their leaves, two of them almost bare. Roadside grass is mostly yellow or tan now.

1988: All of the last Osage leaves fell today.

1992: To northern Illinois, pears trees throughout are yellow, hold at maybe half their leaves.

1994: Last flowers shrivel on the witch hazel. Last year in the cold, they held through December. In this year's warmth, their peak was over a couple of weeks ago. One mum, the white in the south garden, is still in bloom, a few pink yarrow are still fresh along the north fence, a few rose buds still look promising
beside them.

2001: Returning from a Thanksgiving reunion in Wisconsin, I drove into the eye of a low-pressure system that was moving from west to east. Barometric lows appear like dips or troughs on a graph, but when you ride the low, you travel inside its hollow core and can watch it spin heavily around you.
This late morning, I came south through a wall of rain out into the windswept opening of sky and clouds. Behind me and on my right and left, the horizon was dark. My road went straight into the white horizon toward a nucleus of blue that slowly dissolved to gossamer cirrus broken by intrusions of stratus fractus, jagged and torn by the wind and so low I felt I was flying dhrough them.
The eyelid of the storm opened and shut for hours. Sometimes the sun appeared, and I moved into a swell of light, and the plowed prairie around me glowed in patches, then quieted again as my position changed. I passed into new breaches and between waves, long banks of gray and sun, now cirrus and altostratus, then tufted, broken, piled cumulus, some bright, some black, shapes from childhood, shaggy angels, anvils, whales, rabbits, snowmen, cottony jumbles. The grass beside me leaned and quivered. Whitecaps rose on the farm ponds. The rain pools on the roadsides rippled in the hard southeast wind. A flock of crows came over, later blackbirds. Gulls in one field, geese in another, waited for the storm to subside.
When I turned east to Indianapolis, I reached the leading side of the front, the wind shifted to the southwest, the windows of light closed, and the sky turned flat and dull. The rain started. Through the day, I had cut down from the northern rim of the great spinning low into its heart, and then to its foremost edge. Before it could engulf me again, I pierced its side and emerged ahead of it as the afternoon ended.
But here in Yellow Springs when I went to bed, the front caught up with me anyway, and as I went to sleep, I imagined the moon shining in its eye.

2004: Robins still common, peeping in the honeysuckles.

2007: I noticed that the beech on Dayton Street had lost all its leaves – probably when we were gone and at the same time the white mulberry came down, around the 23rd or 24th.

November 27th
The 331st Day of the Year

At the eleventh hour, late in the year, we have visions of the life we might have lived.

Henry David Thoreau

Sunrise/set: 7:34/5:11 Day's Length: 9 hours 37 minutes
Average High/Low: 45/30 Average Temperature: 38
Record High: 74 - 1990 Record Low: 0 - 1930

Weather
This is the rainiest day on record for the entire year in Yellow Springs, with precipitation (but almost never snow) noted 70 percent of the time. Highs in the 70s occur five to ten percent of the years, 60s twenty percent, 50s thirty percent, 40s thirty-five percent, 30s five to ten percent. Clouds dominate the sky, allowing sun to come through just four days out of ten. Morning lows dip under 32 degrees four days in ten as well.

Natural Calendar
In the woods, second spring is often halted by the accumulation of chilly nights and cloudy, brisk days. All across the Midwestern wetlands, the last sandhill cranes depart for Florida.

Daybook
1984: Most Osage and mock orange leaves suddenly gone.

1985: Most Osage hold, many mock orange, forsythia still strong,
clearly affected by the lack of frost. A third of the poplars have kept their leaves.

1988: Paperwhites, started on the 22nd at two inches, are up to
five inches now.

1990: Almost all the downtown pear leaves have fallen in piles along the sidewalks. Only the last willows and Osage hold. But the grass is beginning to grow after a long warm spell in the 60s and 70s. Yesterday and today the cardinals were singing more, overcome by this early thaw.

1993: All the rest of the Osage leaves fell this week. Fresh chickweed, which sprouted at the end of the summer, is blooming here and there in the yard and in the woods.

1997: Cardinal sang at 7:05 this morning, accompanied by a rooster to the west. In the pond, the fish came up to feed today, swam at the top for a while; Emmett even took a leap out of the water - then settled back to the bottom with the others. Two moths came to the front window last night, even though the temperature was in the 40s. This morning, I found one of them in an old spider web. As I slowly removed the web, the moth flew away.

1999: The New England aster foliage turned yellow in early November; now its leaves are falling. The gooseneck plant turns chocolate brown.

2000: All but one of the sweet gum trees are bare now. Japanese maple down to just a few leaves. Burning bush finally complete.

2004: A few hours fishing for catfish at Caesar Creek this afternoon with John. The barometer was dropping, the wind hard from the south, shifting to the east. The sun was out for a little while, then was covered by altocumulus clouds. The temperature remained steady at about 50 degrees, and we were chilled after only an hour on shore. No bites, but a few boats were out on the water near the dam. A flock of gulls circled back and forth along the channel, the only birds seen.

2006: After almost a week of mild, sunny weather in the 50s and 60s, the koi rose to be fed this morning. Walking in the alley with Bella, I listened to starlings and robins the whole way. Dandelions still flowering at Moya’s; the purple crocus is still open at the north end of the house.

November 28th
The 332nd Day of the Year

When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end….

William Cullen Bryant

Sunrise/set: 7:34/5:11 Day's Length: 9 hours 37 minutes
Average High/Low: 45/30 Average Temperature: 37
Record High: 68 - 1909 Record Low: 4 - 1887

Weather
The sixth cold wave of the month generally reaches Ohio by this date: in fact, today and the next two days are often the coldest of the month. Forty-five percent of the highs are only in the 30s, and 30 percent are in the 40s. Afternoons warm to the 50s on 15 percent of the afternoons, reach the 60s ten percent. Snow falls 20 percent of the years; rain occurs 25 percent. And the sun shines less frequently on this day than on any other day in the entire year in southwest Ohio: less than 30 percent of the time.

Natural Calendar
By ten o'clock at night in late November, the winter stars have moved deep into the sky. The Pleiades are almost overhead, leading on the Hyades, Taurus, and Aldebaran. Orion towers in the southeast, followed by Sirius and Procyon. Castor and Pollux, the rulers of January, stand above Orion's hounds. Summer’s Dolphin is pursuing Altair into the west. October's Fomalhaut sinks into the southwest, directly below the Great Square. August's Vega is setting. Cygnus, the swan of the Northern Cross, and the lanky gauge of autumn's progress, is disappearing south. Pegasus and Andromeda fall away behind it.

Daybook
1983: Pear leaves are rich brown along Xenia Avenue. Most forsythia foliage is gone.

1990: No geese heard in four or five days. Maybe their fall restlessness is over now. Osage leaves coming down in bunches.

1992: One periwinkle seen blooming in front of Tat's house in Chicago. Long flock of blackbirds seen in central Indiana, a huge "V" of geese as I approached Indianapolis.

1993: First striped-breasted sparrow of the season seen at the bird feeder today.

1997: The blackened lilac leaves have finally come down. The forsythia hedge is almost empty. Privets are bare, their blue berries standing out. Crows came through the neighborhood at 7:30 sharp this morning.

2000: Pear trees in Springfield darkening and starting to lose their leaves. Beech and English oak down to maybe just ten percent. Last sweet gum finally breaking down. At school, one ladybug and one fly on the staircase windows. Two dandelions open in the grass in spite of the gray and cold and wind.

2002: Five large hawks counted on the way to Wisconsin. The roadside grass throughout the trip was bright green. In the Madison arboretum, geese flew back and forth during our walk.

2004: All the rest of the beech leaves came down this weekend, and the downtown pears have lost more than half of their foliage (their color is still red – not the brown of twenty years ago). Jerry and Lee’s sweet gum is down to just a handful of leaves. The “squat ashes” that line the south part of Xenia Avenue are shedding in tandem with the pears and beeches.

2005: Downtown pear trees have lost about half their foliage, their color mostly green. Only a few fragments remain on other trees (beeches, mock orange, Osage and sweet gums all down). It was warm and windy today. I planted ten late tulips in the east garden. The koi began to move around and feed as the rain arrived late in the afternoon.
This evening, a woman called from Grinnell Circle, said that she had seen about thirty sandhill cranes flying over the South Glen heading south along the river. It was around noon, and she was walking the Sontag’s dog that she was caring for over the holiday.
“I know that sound,” she said. “I heard it in South Dakota.”
They were flying “higher than buzzards,” and she went to get her binoculars; by the time she returned they were almost out of sight. “You know them when you hear them,” she said, but she returned to the house, listened to her CD of bird calls to double check her identification. And she wondered if other people had called in with the sighting. Even though she has taught birding, “It’s always good to have another birder tell you you’re right.”
The last report I had of cranes flying over Yellow Springs was on December 2, 2003.

2007: Crisp morning, frost on the fallen leaves. I counted twenty starlings in Don’s alley tree. Two crows came by about 7:30 a.m. All of the burning bush leaves have fallen in the past week, and the bittersweet leaves and orange hulls are on the sidewalk. The hostas are dissolving into the ground, and the brown stonecrop plants are falling over. Out in town, pansies and flowering kale have held on well. After walking Bella, I moved the two birdfeeders from the west corner of the back yard into the front garden. In the afternoon, I mowed the lawn, mulching the leaves that covered it. Seven firm amaryllis bulbs taken from the garden, their tops badly burned from the frost. I planted them and brought them indoors to see how their would do. A large starling flock along the way to Enon late in the afternoon.

November 29th
The 333rd Day of the Year

The wonder of the world,
The beauty and power,
The shapes of things,
Their colors, lights, and shades:
These I saw.
Look ye also while life lasts.

The Great Epitaph

Sunrise/set: 7:35/5:11 Day's Length: 9 hours 36 minutes
Average High/Low: 45/29 Average Temperature: 37
Record High: 70 - 1927 Record Low: - 2 - 1887

Weather
Today is a chilly day, with a 70 percent chance of freezing morning temperatures. Precipitation comes four years in ten, half the time as rain, the other half as snow. Highs are in the 60s ten percent of the time, in the 50s just five percent, in the 40s forty-five percent, in the 30s thirty percent, the 20s ten percent. Skies are completely overcast 40 percent of the years. Low temperatures in southwestern Ohio can fall below zero between this date and March 20th.

Natural Calendar
Advent, the Christian vigil season for Christmas, begins at the end of November or the first days of December, and it parallels a period of radical change in local weather.
On December 2nd, close to Advent’s first Sunday, the sun reaches its earliest setting of the year in Yellow Springs and continues to set at the same time for twelve days. Then on the 14th of the month, just before Advent's third Sunday (the Gaudete or rejoicing Sunday), sunset begins to occur a minute later every two or three days.
This small advance, however, is offset by the sun rising later in the morning. And the point-counterpoint of time lost and gained creates a weeklong standoff around winter solstice during which the day's length remains its shortest of the year in this location, nine hours and twenty minutes.
Christmas day, the fulfillment of Advent, marks the end of these darkest days, and on the feast of St. Stephen, December 26th, daylight begins to increase for the first time since the end of June.
Sunrise, however, keeps taking place slightly later up until New Year's Eve. Finally, within the octave of Epiphany, the last of the major Christmas celebrations, mornings finally lengthen. The reversal of the sun's course and the 40-day vigil for its turn toward summer are complete.

Daybook
1982: The garden is ready for spring, the weeds all pulled, vines and stalks thrown on the compost, asparagus cut back, manure and shredded leaves dug under, pathways set, the earth smoothed over. The summer's garlic, planted in October, is half a foot tall. Spinach is sown for March. Worms have come to work the topsoil, sparrows clean the last seeds, the grass snakes are sleeping in
the stone wall. Parsley and thyme are mulched deep with straw.

1983: From this point, growth, even among the winter plants like purple deadnettle and henbit, dock, dandelions, is almost imperceptible, and the cold does away with all their November progress.

1988: Paperwhites are nine inches tall today: they started at two inches on the 22nd. The amaryllis, begun on the 13th, has grown 13 inches. Sun dogs seen in the late afternoon sky.

1990: First mother-of-millions noticed flowering in the greenhouse.

1991: On the way from St. Louis home: long flocks of blackbirds near the Mississippi.

1992: Redheaded finches (four of them at the thistle seed this morning) identified as house finches, introduced in 1940, "exploding" through the eastern half of the country according to Peterson's guide.

1993: First junco seen at the feeder today, and the first wren since early in the summer.

1995: Cardinal sings at 8:00 this morning, and again fifteen minutes later. At the triangle park, the tips of the spruce branches have more new needles now, quite a bit of progress since I first noticed growth in October. At the corner of Limestone and High Streets, bittersweet continues to fall to the sidewalk. Along Dayton Street, the yellow witch hazel flowers are shriveling.

2000: Thunder with flurries this morning, a flicker of spring or remnant of summer just as the landscape settles down to December and January stasis.

2001: Pear leaves are red and gold downtown, thinned to maybe just a fourth of their summer number.

2004: Around the yard, some Osage and mock orange still hang on, but the lilacs are finally down. Parsley is still bright under the old apple tree, and lavender is still blooming in the garden over on the corner. I saw a few purple asters blooming around town yesterday. The soil thermometer near the pond says 43 degrees, its lowest reading of the fall.

2005: Robins still calling and flying around the Stafford Street alley before sunrise. One robin even gave a long singsong call a few days ago, maybe on the 25th.

2007: No robins seen or heard for almost a month. About fifty or more starlings in Don’s trees this morning, the most I’ve seen there. Some of the pear trees downtown are bare, some about three-fourths fallen. Two orange woolly bear caterpillars found in the flower pots outside yesterday; I put them in the hollow of the old apple tree stump. Paperwhites planted today.

November 30th
The 334th Day of the Year

Comes with evening now
Out of the afterglow
the west wind growing:
Over the hill and the red hawthorn
over the stubbled field and the brown shocked corn,
from Venus dreaming in the smoldering sky
the wind comes mourning.

August Derleth

Sunrise/set: 7:36/5:11 Day's Length: 9 hours 35 minutes
Average High/Low: 44/29 Average Temperature: 37
Record High: 69 - 1934 Record Low: - 2 - 1958

Weather
Temperatures reach the 60s on ten percent of the days, climb to the 50s fifteen percent, to the 40s forty percent, to the 30s thirty percent, to the 20s five percent. The sun shines half the time, and rain comes 15 percent of the days, snow another 15 percent. Two nights out three, lows drop below freezing.

Natural Calendar
Depending on the year, the final losses occur on beeches or pears. Sometimes oaks are the holdouts, sometimes forsythia, or a hardy honeysuckle. Sometimes sweet gums and poplars keep a few leaves this late in the year; sometimes osage, mock orange and lilacs outlast all the other trees and shrubs.

Daybook
1982: Grinnell Mill: chickweed and dandelions flowering. Spring
foliage found up river: mint, hemlock, henbit, clover, thistle, yarrow, purple deadnettle, sweet rocket, garlic mustard, leafcup, sedum, dock, parsnip, moneywort, waterleaf, avens.

1984: Beech leaves hang on this year, maybe a third. Mums killed by hard freeze, also the broccoli, petunias, alyssum. A few forsythia flowers hold. All Osage and mock orange done. Sweet gum trees at the art institute have a just few leaves left.

1985: Birch leaves gone.

1986: Forsythia noticed gone, all honeysuckle too.

1988: All leaves now gone.

1989: Cardinal sings once at 8:08 a.m., the morning sunny, garden covered with frost. The pear leaves have all fallen downtown, the Christmas lights can shine through. Forsythia, honeysuckle, mock orange, Osage have all come down in the last ten days. In the greenhouse, two new geraniums have bloomed; tomatoes are full size, still green. October zinnias wilting, mums and impatiens a little stalky. Most coleus killed by mealy bugs. Lettuce under lights, brought in from the garden October 15th, has remained strong. The violet hibiscus blossoms every few days.

1992: Sparrow hawk seen on the telephone wires along Wilberforce-Clifton, first of the season.

1997: After three days of temperatures in the 60s, the first front of December approaches tonight. Pears thinning downtown.

1998: A November of grace - clear skies and warm temperatures. All of the light lately has been the special light that Derleth talks about “during that recessive period of the year.”

1999: All but a few dozen lilac leaves have come down now. All but two of the poplars fell in this last cold wave, the last of the Osage too, and the beech has just a few patches of lower leaves. With temperatures in the teens tonight, the pears are next.

2000: Two ladybugs in the stairwell window at school. Along the bike path, three-fourths of the honeysuckle leaves are down.

2001: Three turkey vultures seen on the way back from Fairborn this morning. They were riding on the hard west wind.

2005: A brisk, raw day: The starlings were gone from their tree this morning, and I saw now robins in the Stafford Street alley. Last night, Rod said that all the leaves fell from his pear tree on Sunday the 27th.

2007: The late third quarter of the Sandhill Crane Moon brought sightings of to the village. Dorothy Smith wrote that “on Friday (11/30) about noon, I heard some strange honking noises and saw very high up in the sky, two small groups of big crane-like birds circling over my yard on N. Winter street. I knew they must be sandhills because I'd just read about the Sandhill Crane Moon in your Almanac. Well, I grabbed my cell phone and called my friend Katie Egart over on Pleasant St. and she caught a glimpse of them as they formed into a V and headed due south. She called her friend Chris Glaser who was working over on Whiteman Street, and he saw them too. What a glorious and unexpected sight it was!”

Almost all the leaves have fallen,
And the season is complete.
I forget the recent green and warmth
And carefully watch the firm, poised buds
Of the buckeyes and the pussy willows.
I pretend I know their schedules to the day.
I used to want a climax of thunder and snow
When the leaves came down:
Trees flung across Grinnell Road,
High water and ice, flocks of geese
And buzzards blown south over the Glen.
I wanted to be carried away, saved
By Jesus of the Storm, taken up
Into the first December cyclone, spun
Down the Ohio and the Mississippi
To the Summer Delta. Now I’m almost old
And autumn isn’t quite the same.
I know where all the birds are really going;
Jesus never called me to the Gulf.
Bare branches tell the truth.