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, Journal

EPHEMERIS FOR THE FINAL WEEK OF LATE FALL
The Crow Gathering Moon was new on the 27th at 11:55 a.m. It waxes throughout the week, rising after sunup, setting in the far west in the evening, moving overhead in the afternoon, and entering its second quarter on December 5 at 4:26 p.m. On December 2, sunset occurs at the earliest time of the year in the Lower Midwest; it will remain at that time until the middle of December.

NOTEBOOK
Seven pots of spider plants hang against my greenhouse windows, safe from the wind on the other side. My winter tomatoes hold motionless to their trellises. The violet hibiscus bloom and fall without a sound, are replenished every day. The cacti below them neither increase in size nor die back. Zinnias brought in from the garden have retained their color and shape for the past month.
I usually keep a journal of the indoor and the outside cycles. I have a planting and nature log, and I carefully measure the natural progress of year. But now I am losing interest in the records, am turning to plants that change the least. I want things to stay the way they are. I wish late fall would never end. I'm comfortable with its limits. I'm content with the finite number of species in the ten-by- thirty-foot greenhouse.
I know this static world better than I will ever know the emerging world of April. Since the end of October, I've kept this season stable and warm. I have arbitrarily favored coleus over calendulas, jade trees over geraniums, angel-wing begonias over marigolds. Even the white flies and the mealybugs have contributed to equilibrium, their hunger offsetting growth.
At night, I sit in the silence, hide with my allies behind this glass south wall, feel our bond and our common purpose. No spring birds are singing. There are no fireflies or crickets to mark the passage of the year and of my life, no signs that any of this could ever end. Against the unchanging landscape of the cold, I place the defiant leaves of my inner sanctum, balancing the cruel stasis of the winter with the slow green stasis of my retreat.