Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

THE WEEKS OF JANUARY

The Week That Deep Winter Arrives
The texture of the deep winter is visible in the tone of the weather and the state of wildflower foliage. It is gauged by milestones of birdsong and opossum sightings, and by the steady shifting of the sun. The motions are slow and easily measured. This is a simple place to begin to know the year.
January scatters the last of the wildflowers, or it feeds them to the sparrows and downy woodpeckers. Milkweed pods are empty now. Almost all the goldenrod and aster seeds are gone. Only a few wingstem and ironweed kernels still hang to their stalks
During the warmer Northern winters and across the South, fresh foliage of columbine, dandelion, garlic mustard, sedum, wild onion, ground ivy, leafcup and celandine appears in sheltered areas. Skunk cabbage, dock and ragwort can be growing in the swamps. Watercress is bright green in the streams. New mint grows back under the protection of a southern wall.
In the pastures, spring thistles, sweet rockets, and great mullein add basil leaves when the weather is temperate. Parsley and kale could be holding out in the garden. Three inches below the mulch, blanched daffodils are pushing up.

The Week Foxes Mate
As the sun starts to rise a little earlier, mating time approaches for foxes. Watch for them playing and courting in the fields. Owls have established their territories, and the earliest ones are nesting. Sometimes hyacinths are up an inch or so in yards throughout the Border States, and sometimes crocus foliage and day lily spears are three inches tall. Forsythia and clematis can show a leaf or two.
Even snowdrops can be out of the ground when the sun starts to rise earlier. Moss lengthens a fraction of an inch in each thaw. There can be fresh poppy leaves in the garden, new pyrethrums and wrinkled lemon verbena. Pine trees pollinate, and henbit can bloom any time an afternoon gets into the 50s. A few pussy willow catkins open slightly in the thaws. Moss lengthens just a fraction of an inch, and the buds of motherwort and multiflora roses become longer, some unraveling.

The Week Crows Migrate
When the North lies exactly in the middle of its peak snow period and average temperatures are the lowest of the year, then the advance of spring quickens, and the night starts contracting by two to three minutes each day all the way into June. Crows know all about the expanding daylight. Their migration cycle typically starts at the early edge of the night’s retreat. Junco movement begins in mid-January too.
This is also the week opossums and raccoons become more active, and they appear at night along the back roads. Once you sight these small mammals, then you know for sure late winter is on the way. Sometimes a fly will hatch in your automobile or sunroom. Winter-blooming hellebores and Chinese witch hazels blossom as far north as the Great Lakes.

The Week That Cardinals Sing
By the end of January, deep winter moves to its close, and late winter is carried across the Mississippi by the lengthening days and the relentless passage of south winds that always follow each cold spell. By the end of the month, normal averages break their stagnation, edging up a full degree. And at the same time that averages start to climb in Chicago or New York, they come up almost everywhere above the Tropic of Cancer. Local thermometers not only see the progress within their own microclimate, but almost everywhere else, too.
The fourth week of January is also the time of the January Thaw, the brisk pace of winter high pressure systems often growing sluggish and stalling somewhere between the 21st and the 26th, bringing a major warm-up to most of the country. Snowfall is normally the lightest of any other week this month, and a day in the 70s suddenly becomes possible above the Mason-Dixon Line (at least once or twice in a century). A thunderstorm even occurs ten percent of all the years.
Influenced by these massive meteorological changes, cardinals, start mating calls half an hour before dawn. By the end of the month, the first major waves of robins and bluebirds cross the Ohio River. And resident crows, sparrows, starlings and blue jays become more active, contributing to a substantial increase in the volume of morning birdsong. The full onslaught of change now starts to ride over the land, momentum building inexorably and mightily, pulling the Northern Hemisphere with the godlike energy of the entire solar system back toward summer.