The spring flowers, the autumn moon;
Summer breezes, winter snow.
If useless things do not clutter your mind,
You have the best days of your life.

Mumon Ekai, 13th Century Zen monk/trans. Katsuki Sekida

EPHEMERIS FOR THE SECOND WEEK OF LATE WINTER
The Eleventh Week Of The Natural Year
When the Day Is an Hour Shorter Than at Solstice
When Monarch Butterflies Depart from Mexico for Yellow Springs
And Pollen Drifts up from the South

    The Skunk Cabbage Moon enters its final quarter at 6:49 p.m. on February 5. Rising after midnight and setting in the late morning to early afternoon, this waning moon lies overhead after dawn. When the moon moves overhead at noon, it will become the Running Maple Sap Moon to bring up the sap throughout the Miami Valley.

    On February 6, the day’s length surpasses 10 hours and 20 minutes along the 40th Parallel, making the local night an hour shorter than it was when the days first started to grow on December 26. On February 8, sunset occurs after 6:00 p.m. for the first time since October 12. And on February 12, the sun reaches 40 percent of the way to equinox.

    The pollen season, which ended with early winter, now begins again across the South with the blooming of mountain cedar, acacia, smooth alder, bald cypress, American elm, red maple, white poplar and black willow. Bluegrass, which stopped flowering in midsummer, revives and starts its seeding cycle. As the February thaws bring moisture and warmth from the Gulf of Mexico to Yellow Springs, they also bring the pollen from all the states between Florida and Kentucky. Tree pollen season peaks throughout the Miami Valley in April and May. Grass pollen is most intense in May and June, weed and wildflower pollen in August through October.

    In Michoacan, Mexico, monarch butterflies have now started moving toward the Texas border. They will reach the Gulf coast in small groups during mid to late March, and their offspring will come to lay their eggs in the Midwest in May. The butterflies that emerge here will fly north to Canada to breed, and the monarchs we see in September will be adults three generation removed from those that are just leaving Michoacan. Those butterflies will return to Mexico for the winter, renewing the migration pattern this week of 2011.
PASSAGE TO SPRING

Nothing has changed and never will change; it is mine forever.
Charles Burchfield, Journal, August 15, 1922

    The old year lost its power at some point in January. I felt rather than saw the change take place. Using inventories of what was taking place in the landscape, I tried to define just what was involved in the disappearance of late autumn. I tried to understand just how something so obvious and powerful eluded me. Where had it gone and how did it disappear?

   After leafdrop, there was a lingering sense of the canopy, remnants reminding me of what had been there. Certain shrubs and trees kept their leaves longer than others, the honeysuckles and the pears and some oaks. The foliage trickled away during December, and then I became distracted by cold or snow. I experienced a certain disbelief at the bare branches, and then a relief that the fall was over and that the crisis had passed. I felt a hardening of the heart, a hunkering down for the weather to come.   

    Berries dwindled after Christmas, but without the drama of leaf-fall. Then January stripped away so much time from December sunsets, setting the birds singing and promising things they could not deliver soon enough. I instinctively looked for pieces of the new year, finally tiring of counting the old pieces. Pussy willows and the foliage of the earliest bulbs emerged ever so slightly. Little by little they all erased the loss of the previous spring, summer and fall.

   Counting one thing is always about counting something else. The question of recollection asks me about something more, asks about passage and value and the shades of loss and reconciliation. I picture people separated from me like seasons (for whatever reason, from transgression, from death, from distance), and I wonder about the perennial return of their images and the power of their continued presence.

    They come back again and again, sometimes embodied in another person, sometimes only as pain or reassurance. It is as if my soul turned like a parallel planet to a far-flung sun, its rings filled with living dust of voice and picture, set to its own year of who-knows-how-many days. Somehow it slides into sync with my body’s earthly year and tells me stories.