In the fifth day of the thaw, the temperature beginning at 51 this morning, snow has disappeared from most of the garden space, offering a base line from which spring might be measured. After a bitter January with more than a foot of snow, the ground was frozen as much as it would ever be here in Yellow Springs, and a record of this year’s changes in the landscape from today forward  – even if those changes are halted by more severe weather – can be used to evaluate the progress of springs past and of springs yet to come.

Daybook, February 10, 2009

   The Shining Grackle Moon waxes through the week until it is completely full at 9:38 p.m. on March 10. Rising in the afternoon and setting in the morning, this moon comes over Glen Helen after dark.
Daylight Savings Time begins at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, March 8. On the same day, the sun reaches a declination of 4 degrees, 57 minutes, 80 percent of the way to spring.

25 YEARS OF ALMANACKING: USING A DAYBOOK
     This almanack grew out of nature observations I began to write down in 1978 when our family moved to southwestern Ohio from North Carolina. Over the years, these notes have become a daybook which brings together all of the annual entries for the same day. This cumulative record has shown me the regularity of the changes in the seasons, and it fleshes out a broad, slow picture of each segment of the year.
    The repetitions of similar observations are included as I originally put them in my notebook because of the lessons they taught me, that each portion of the year is remarkably similar to that same portion each year, and that the differences can easily be measured by any number of plants, birds, and insects. Each piece of information is a particle of each season, without which fragments there would be no visible year at all; together the pieces demonstrate to me that the year truly is the sum of its parts; the more parts one can identify, and the more years one can add to the mix, the more the whole becomes.
    The daily cumulative record has also taught me something that my life has taught me too, that years and days and seasons eventually blend together, becoming unified and whole, one spring or summer standing for all those springs and summers that came before and all that will follow, and, in some ways, one day even standing for and somehow actually turning into every day.