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. 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.

Daybook

EPHEMERIS
    The Crow Gathering Moon, entering its second quarter at 4:26 p.m. on December 5, waxes throughout the period. Coming up in the afternoon and setting before dawn, the gibbous moon lies overhead in the evening. Lunar perigee, the point at which the moon is closest to Earth, occurs on December 12. The moon is also full on that day at 11:37 a.m.

     By 9:00 p.m., Orion has fully risen from the woods, and its outriders, the Pleiades, are almost directly above you. The Big Dipper points to Polaris from its winter evening position along the northern horizon. The Milky Way extends from just above the Dog Star to the last remnants of summer, the wings of Cygnus the Swan. Venus and Jupiter, huge and bright in the southwest just after sundown, have disappeared when Orion fills the east. Saturn follows Leo across the center of the sky after midnight. Mars in Ophiuchus emerges near sunup.

NOTEBOOK ON THE EDGE OF EARLY WINTER
     South Glen in the afternoon, sun in and out between gray-blue clouds: One duck on the water, two kingfishers chasing back and forth, sparrows chattering, milkweed pods half open, their disheveled seeds half hanging 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 ironweed still intact, pale and soft, craneflies swarming, woodpeckers rattling on the far side of the field.

     
At Jacoby swamp, skunk cabbage is six inches high. No trace of the long patches of lizard's tail that bloomed along the banks in July. Sweet Cicely seedpods: sharp black crescents. Bearded thistles sagging, teasel strong and stiff, angelica breaking apart, hollow leaning wingstem with its leaves bent tight around its stalks, asters coming undone. Leafcup burned by the cold, dock, garlic mustard and dame’s rocket limp, collapsed. Buds of the maples prominent, seed wings still hanging from the box elders.

     
Pale champagnes of the field grass and goldenrod, russets of the Japanese knotweed, red honeysuckle berries and red rose hips (and two new rose leaves pushing out), oak bark black and shining from the morning’s rain, white sycamores, purple raspberry stalks, all reflected in the low river so still that it takes each object and color without distortion, holding them together among charcoal branches and the alternate bright and dull waves of sky.