POOR WILL'S ALMANACK FOR 2010

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POOR WILL'S ALMANACK FOR 2010

Contains

An Astronomical Overview of 2010
The Names & Phases of the Moons
Weekly Notes on the Progress of the Year
Bill Felker’s Journal
A Calendar of Flowering Plants, Trees & Shrubs
A Calendar of Holidays for Sheep and Goat Markets
The Allergy Index
Peak Activity Times for Livestock, Fish & Game
The S.A.D. Index
Almanack Literature (Reader Stories)

A NOTE ABOUT PUZZLES -
Monthly scrambled-word puzzles (Sckramblers) and Logical Almanacker Puzzles with cash prizes for the winners are not included in this year’s Almanack. The Sckramblers, however, will be available to the readers of Poor Will’s Almanack at www.poorwillsalmanack.com after January 1, 2010 on the Sckrambler page.

Or you can request a print copy of the puzzles after December 1, 2009 by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387.

SAMPLES OF POOR WILL'S ALMANACK FOR 2010

 

INTRODUCTION: BREAKING THE CODE

Nothing seems more drolly trivial than the lives of those whose single achievement is to record the wind and temperature three time a day. Yet such men are doubtless sent into the world for this special end.

James Russell Lowell

My wife, Jean, gave me a barometer for Christmas in 1973, and I have kept a weather journal with it ever since. My chi, my authentic inner self, surged at the instrument's initial fluctuation on Christ's birthday, and I knew from the moment I charted my first cold front that I had been "doubtless sent into the world for this special end."

For most of the roughly 13,000 days since that time, I have kept a map of the seasons, with notebooks and charts that can reconstruct the local natural history of the period with sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset, temperatures, sky cover, precipitation, the plants seen, the condition of the trees and the undergrowth, the fish caught, and the birds observed.

After a few years, I rediscovered the secrets of traditional almanac weather forecasting. On my graphs, I could see how the rising or falling atmospheric pressure related to change. I could watch the pivotal seasonal shifts. I counted the number of cold fronts, rains and snows in a year, and calculated the odds that natural history would repeat itself on any given date.

And I learned the laws of meteorological averages, that the years' temperatures and precipitation even themselves out. Normal annual temperatures are remarkably similar from one year to the next. Balance is the rule. The year always makes up for its periods of excess. I also learned that, despite such stability, unpredictable change remains the source of balance.

The weather journal tells so much that I keep wanting it to reveal the dimensions of the last forecasting frontier and allow me to predict the individual character of any year or season. I read and reread my statistics, reflect over and over on the nature of the graphs. It is all, I feel, an encoded message from the past to the future. If only I could break the code.

Does a cold March foretell a fierce winter nine months to come? Does a warm January presage unbearable dog days in July? Will the year ahead be dry or wet? Will the rains come on time? Like the alchemist, I watch and stir the elements, trying new combinations of data and new ingredients to answer such questions. I feel the answers are already in front of me. If only I knew where or how to look.

I remember once in Tennessee Jean telling me she knew the rain would end because the birds were singing. I hadn't noticed. She was right. The birds always sang just before the rain ended. The discovery, the breaking of the code, will be like that: the answer will have been there all along.

And so I fantasize. I imagine that one day, I will stumble across the secret. I will see it in a certain slant of a barometric rise, related to a certain ring around the sun, a certain haze or fog, a certain shift in the wind at a certain time of the Thyme-leafed Speedwell Moon, repeated on some apparently normal morning, after a particular delicate wave in the alto cirrus.

I will make the connection, tie those events indisputably to a record-setting August, to the blizzard of the century, or to an early frost. Inaccessible to distant satellites or radar or computers, the secret will tumble out onto my page like a climatic Rosetta stone, and it will decipher in a flash the movements of the whole world.

Then from this ordinary place, I will be able to listen to the call of a cricket or watch the breeze across the kale and the glow of the sunrise on the dew, and I will know, without the slightest doubt, the color of the next day’s sky, the hour of the next rain, the speed of the wind tomorrow.

A NOTE ABOUT ALMANACK LITERATURE
Twenty-six years ago this coming February, my first Poor Will’s Almanack appeared as a column in The Yellow Springs News.

Over a quarter century of putting together almanacs has given me a chance to explore everything from prostitution in my hometown to personal existential angst. If my columns have helped me clarify what I thought a small town should be, it also helped me clarify what I should be. Watching the seasons became a process of self-definition as well as definition of habitat. Through the years, I continue to find new ways to see the commonplace and to define home.

Toward the end of the 1980s, I began to ask for reader contributions, and Almanack Literature was born. People wrote all kinds of things for my column: memory stories, outhouse tales, narratives about birthday parties, about unusual occurrences, about falling in love, and about their favorite animals. The stories included in Poor Will’s Almanack for 2010 are some of my favorites. That they are juxtaposed with a nature journal and astronomical notes may seem somewhat strange to some. And before I started writing almanacks, I would never have foreseen the combination, for example, of outhouse stories with my very personal ruminations. An almanack, however, is a supremely eclectic genre; if an introvert with a lonely sense of fun were to select a way to combine both parts of his or her personality, almanacking might just be the path to follow.

So Poor Will has not only helped me to take myself less seriously, but has also infused a community and a sense of humor into my solitary reflections and compilations. So the inclusion of stories by my contributors is organic to the process. We are all in this together.

FEBRUARY
THE MONTH OF THE SKUNK CABBAGE MOON

THE FIRST QUARTER
When Doves Call

February 1 - 7

The first excitement of the daybook was a simple one. I saw a parallel to my own seeming lack of growth and change. I saw that nature was as deliberate as I was, that the movements I made in a day toward my purposes were as slow as the progress of a season; so, I thought, my seasons might, in time, take on the bright color, the clear direction, the sense, and the harmony of the year.

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NOTES ON THE PROGRESS OF THE YEAR
The Groundhog Day Thaw will get underway by February 1 as the last cold front of January moves east. Thunderstorms can make their appearance with that thaw, and the temperature of the earth sometimes surges well above 40 degrees, telling the pastures to start growing.

JOURNAL
January’s cold has given way to thaw. Now with the snow gone, the land has been transformed. In some ways, nothing has changed with the arrival of the New Year. The trees are still bare, and no new sprouts have appeared in the undergrowth. Pussy willow catkins are thin and tight. Forsythia buds show no hint of their February blush.

Autumn’s fruits, however, are giving way to the weather, measuring the advance of the Northern Hemisphere back toward the sun. The hulls of last June’s sweet rockets and August’s wild cucumbers are empty, brittle and delicate like shed snakeskin. The Japanese knotweed leaves hang like huge russet cocoons. Milkweed pods are stained and empty. The feathery tufts of virgin’s bower, soft and thick in late November, have blown away in the wind. The final rose of Sharon seeds lie precariously in their open calices. Worn seed heads of ironweed are half gone.

The dried flower clusters of purple coneflowers and zinnias, tough and unyielding a month ago, crumble between my fingers. Honeysuckle and euonymus berries still hang to their branches, but their firmness is gone. Osage fruit is darkening quickly, breaking down, squashy.

Taking my time, enjoying the warmth, I check the buds on trees and shrubs: Hard, scarlet buds on the wild multiflora roses; box elder buds, barely visible, tucked tightly to their green branches; privet buds, minute and black; pale, supple buds of the honeysuckle; on the blackberry canes were blood-red buds, their color spreading to the sides of the stalks.

I feel the fleshy, orange buds of the buckeyes; the tight, round, silver buds of the dogwoods, each one marking the tip of its limb; the stiff, woody buds of the crab apples; the pale green buds of the lilac; the sharp and thorn-like buds of the American beech; the deep purple bud clusters of the red maples; the phallic protrusions of the ginkgo.

I measure the gray velvety buds of the white magnolia; the tiny russet linden buds; the yellow-brown, fat sweet gum buds growing beside their dangling fruit; birch buds with their willowy catkins; the buds of the tree-of-heaven, hiding in the hollows of last year’s branches; flushed azalea buds protected by their shining leaves.

As the thaw deepens, remnants of the past year no longer point to the warmth of last October. In the pond, wild iris spears that braved weeks of ice stand strong around the broken strands of lizard’s tail. As the bamboo in my south garden recovers from the weight of the snow, it shows sweet rockets, ground ivy, great mullein, celandine, wild lettuce, dock, sweet Williams and lamb’s ear waiting for April and May.

ALMANACK LITERATURE
SURPRISE!
Mrs. Robert Falon, Delta, Ohio

We used to live across the driveway from my brother-in-law's house, and this incident occurred when they were in the process of remodeling their bathroom.

At that time, we had a flock of laying hens, and one old hen would always lay her egg in the corner of the abandoned outhouse in a small wooden box intended to store the toilet paper or the Sears and Roebuck catalog.

And I was in the habit of collecting that egg on a regular basis.

Well, on this particular day, I approached the outhouse, and flung open the door as usual. Then my eyes met the startled gaze of an unexpected occupant seated directly in front of me.

I was overcome with shock, and acting on impulse, I reached around to the box and lifted out the egg!
The poor, unsuspecting gentleman I surprised was the man who was remodeling the house next door!

 

FEBRUARY
THE SECOND QUARTER
When Starlings Swarm to the City

February 8 - 14

Time consists of the units of its measure. Those units may be grasses instead of minutes, and damselflies instead of hours, flowers instead of days, box turtles instead of years. Temporal value requires neither logic nor consistency nor numerical sequence nor social order. Our individual, arbitrary visions, deliberate or accidental, are the only true points of reference, and our record of what we see and experience is the only history.

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NOTES ON THE PROGRESS OF THE YEAR
By the 8th of February the day's length reaches a full ten and a half hours, more than an hour longer than at Christmas. Garlic planted in late November has pushed out of the ground; cloves set in early October are already several inches high. All along the 40th Parallel, people are getting ready to tap maples for sap.

JOURNAL
Inventory in the snow, in the afternoon before the thaw, gibbous moon rising in the clear, robin’s-egg blue sky: Bamboo leaves grayed and shriveled by the cold January, some leaves shedding. Mexican sunflower heads white and withered, heads bend double.

Ice around the pond waterfall, the heater helping the iris to grow back maybe three inches. Tight brown buds on the lilacs. Hackberries on the snow, and branches, leftovers from the starling flock of yesterday. Stalks of astilbe, hosta, aster, Jerusalem artichokes, ferns sticking up but heads broken off some.

Winterberry dark olive green brown leaves, seeds holding. Black seeds of hosta on the snow. Last petals of oakleaf hydrangea, rust brown seeds of the redbuds. Peeping of robins, passing of crows. Fragile pokeweed, berries gone, only stems. Skirts of sunflower seed hulls left all around the bird feeders. Crab apples in the snow, the tree - like the hackberry - ravaged by the starlings a day ago. Rose leaves dark olive brown. Gray rosemary and butterfly bush stalks. A little green sweet William foliage showing through the ice. Yellowish Joe Pye heads, heads of monarda, and stonecrop, pale iris spears, rose of Sharon pods half empty, pods open like hands to the sky.

ALMANACK LITERATURE
GROWING UP
by Naomi Bliss, Switzerland County, Indiana

Do you recall the day you became an adult? I recall very well. I was a thin, frail child about ten or eleven years old, unaccustomed to making decisions of any magnitude.

Mama was a woman of many talents. Her greatest was her concern for others. She shared in every way she could. One of the things she did was to make burial clothing for any woman or child who died in our town, if the family could not furnish clothing for the laying out.

Several times a year, Mama was asked by the undertaker for clothing. Mama would go and look at the body, usually in the person's home (in those days the deceased were usually left at home until the burial service). After seeing the body, Mama would hurry back and go through a large box of materials she accumulated.

She would make the underwear, slip and dress, and then she would the visit the home again to dress the deceased.

On the day I recall so vividly, Mama had made clothing for a small girl of about my age and size. The dress was soft, white, lace trimmed with a pink sash. But Mama went again and again to look through her materials box until I finally asked her what she was looking for. She seemed perplexed and said, "I need to cover her legs" (the caskets then opened full length).

In an instant my mind went to my prized pair of white long stockings, but I rejected giving them up. Then Mama took the clothing and left to dress the child.

I waited for her return. Time passed. Finally, I could wait no longer. I grabbed up my white stockings and carried them to the small girl's home. I asked for Mama, and was shown into the room where the dead child lay. Mama stopped her work. I put the stockings in her hands. Her eyes filled with tears. She took me in her arms and said, "What a precious big girl you are."

NOVEMBER
THE SECOND QUARTER
When Deer Are Courting in Second Spring

November 9 - 15

Counting absences
Days without red-winged blackbirds:
Autumn Samadhi

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NOTES ON THE PROGRESS OF THE YEAR
This is the middle of second spring. When the temperature reaches 60, and cardinals are singing, November seems like April. Waterleaf is strong on the slopes. Celandine is blooming, along with a few dandelions, some chickweed, some violets. Seeds sprout in rotting logs. The rivers are often high, flushed from autumn rains.

In the lower Midwest, the second and third weeks of November are usually the height of rutting season for white-tailed deer. The activity level increases for deer during courtship and breeding, especially during nighttime hours. In town, almost every junco has arrived for winter. Craneflies are half grown, become more obvious as the only insects out in the cool weather, spinning in the sun. Starlings cluck and sparrows chant off and on from early morning through the afternoon.

JOURNAL
The inventory of middle autumn at the end of October is rich in foliage and color, but the settling in of late autumn draws down the density and texture of the canopy and strips away almost all the floral barriers to winter. As spring overcomes February and March with an accumulation of new growth, fall spreads across the summer with an accumulation of loss.

One enumeration of late fall is the counting of what no longer holds, a counting of emptiness, cued only by memory and the more durable, woody scaffolding that binds the seasons: Foliage of apple trees and crab apple trees, ginkgoes, sugar maples, trees of heaven, redbuds, black walnuts, catalpas, box elders, locusts, elms, birches, poplars, cottonwoods, peach trees, cherry trees, Osage, red oaks, white oaks, chinquapin oaks, sycamores, red mulberries, sweet gums, silver maples, Japanese maples, white mulberry trees, beeches, magnolias, mock orange and silver olive shrubs, honeysuckles, Korean lilacs, quinces, privets, viburnums, burning bush, dogwoods, spireas, standard lilacs, down or collapsing.

Silent mornings: no more robins chattering, no cardinal song, no dove song, no red-winged blackbird song, no grackle song, no cicada song, no katydid song, no cricket song.
Hollow milkweed pods, bare raspberry canes, bare blackberry canes, the leaves of hostas and stonecrop melted, innumerable flowers absent, and harvest complete, no wheat, soybeans, corn, tomatoes, peas, beans, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce.

NOVEMBER
THE THIRD QUARTER

When Juncos Arrive in the North

November 16 - 23

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility.

Thomas Merton

NOTES ON THE PROGRESS OF THE YEAR
On November 22nd, the sun enters the early winter sign of Sagittarius and reaches within two degrees of solstice at the same time. Although astronomical tables reveal these subtle changes in the fortunes of the year, as a practical matter, solar position is actually so stable during this period that it contributes to a calming influence on sheep and people. Weather, on the other hand, becomes far less stable as the year ends, balancing the positive effects of solar stability with the disruptive effects of violent high and low pressure systems

JOURNAL
With most of the canopy gone, the sky has opened up above the river. With the sun out, the water hasn't been so blue since the first of May. Seeds are sprouting in rotten logs, the sweet smell of autumn ground all around me. The brightest November greens are the fresh waterleaf and moss and glade grasses, then the yellow green of the honeysuckles. Chickweed is fresh and thick among the bare purple raspberry canes. The low sun rests in the treetops. The silver winding river, the fallen logs invisible in summer, lie below me.

At home this mild evening in the wind, I sit and watch gusts of leaves sailing over the roof into the pond. Ruby Nicholson wrote me a note about buzzard sightings, maybe hundreds floating in to roost at John Bryan Park. And I talked to Ed Oxley. Crows are coming back, he said. One late cabbage butterfly flies by me looking for cabbages. Craneflies are spinning in the last of the sun and mating on the picnic table. In the southwest corner of the greenhouse, a cricket sings its piercing, vibrating song until I go to bed.

ALMANACK LITERATURE
THE BUMMER EWE
By William S. Weinrich - Piketon, Ohio
This is a story about a bummer ewe lamb that was given to me and my wife for a wedding present. A neighbor of ours raised sheep and had a ewe that had four lambs. The smallest of the four lambs was a ewe lamb. Our neighbor asked my wife if she would like to have this small lamb, so my wife brought it home and raised her on cow’s milk. We had a good Jersey cow, and she gave lots of milk, and this small lamb grew into a nice ewe.

The neighbor had a mixed flock of sheep, and somehow this young ewe gave lots of milk for her twin lambs when she came fresh for the first time, lots more than her lambs needed. This young ewe looked like a small Jersey cow, and even after the lambs had nursed, she had plenty of milk to spare.

A friend of mine had a nanny goat that had triplets but died soon after she freshened. My friend didn’t have time to fool with these baby goats and gave them to my wife. My wife decided to see if the ewe would take the baby goats, and, to her surprise, the ewe took the three baby goats plus her twin lambs and raised all five of the little creatures.

After everyone was weaned and on grain, the ewe wouldn’t go dry. My wife had to milk this ewe like you would a nanny goat. We went to the livestock sale trying to find a bummer lamb or even a baby goat for this ewe to nurse. None could be found, so home we went.

When we got home, the phone was ringing. It was a neighbor whose beef cow had just had twin calves. The cow was an old brute and didn’t have enough milk for two calves. One of the calves was pretty weak, but the neighbor managed to get the first milk from the cow down the calf.

My neighbor asked my wife if she would like to have the weak calf. Maybe she could find a way to raise it. My wife decided to see if her faithful ewe might take this calf. The ewe took the calf and raised it. The sheep milk had to be rich because the calf grew and finally the ewe went dry. She lived for years and put us in the sheep business.

NOVEMBER
THE FOURTH QUARTER
When Silver Maple Leaves Come Down
November 24 - 31

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

NOTES ON THE PROGRESS OF THE YEAR
This week, the silver maples and the oaks thin out. Forsythia turns deep red and gold from frost. Poplars shrivel. I can count the magnolia leaves left. Most mock orange leaves and most of the lilacs are gone. Half the ginkgo seeds hang on above the golden skirt of their fallen foliage. The beeches and pears and willows weaken. Osage fruits are almost all down, stand out chartreuse, at random, in the tangle of the undergrowth. Orange bittersweet is open there. Pink coralberries are glowing.

But November still retains enough of summer’s momentum to hold off early winter this week. The paths of the woodlots stay bright green against the dull fields. Geese still fly back and forth between farm ponds. Starlings are still gathering in the woodlots. Late flocks of bluebirds still fly south. Lawns have grown since their October cuttings, can be long and thick under and around the fallen leaves.

JOURNAL
The final rites of fall include a chronology of the last leaves and fruits. Major losses occur on beeches and pears as autumn ends. Sometimes oaks are the holdouts, sometimes forsythia or a hardy honeysuckle. Sometimes sweet gums and poplars keep a few leaves this late in the year; sometimes protected oak-leaf hydrangeas, Osage, mock orange or lilacs outlast all the other trees and shrubs.

Near the corner of Limestone and High Streets, bittersweet continues to fall to the sidewalk. Along Dayton Street, yellow witch hazel flowers are shriveling. Privets are bare, their blue berries revealed. Euonymus fruits are losing their white outer shells, orange cores unveiled by the cold.

New England aster and stonecrop foliage turned yellow in early November; now the plants are shedding. Late garden lettuce and the autumn growth of rhubarb have withered. Hosta leaves have collapsed into the remnants of maples, ginkgoes and white mulberries. The gooseneck turns chocolate brown. Most all the seeds are gone from milkweed pods; just a few wisps of down cling to their shells. Fragile pokeweed stems have exploded in the frost. The last roses have been frozen by nights in the teens.
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Ten percent of net proceeds from the sale of each Almanack will be committed to acts of random kindness and senseless beauty. A list of these acts will be available upon request in January of 2010.