In reality, history fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. What is of moment is its hue and color. Time hides no treasures; we want not its then, but its now.
Henry David Thoreau

EPHEMERIS FOR THE SECOND WEEK OF EARLY FALL
The Jerusalem Artichoke Moon enters its second quarter on September 25 at 11:50 p.m. Rising in the afternoon and setting at night, this moon moves overhead in the afternoon and evening. It becomes completely full on October 4. Jupiter is the brightest object in the early night sky, lagging behind the shining moon. When Venus and Saturn appear as the morning stars and Mars lies above you, the moon will be gone.

COMMUNITIES
The Rails go westward in the dark. Brother, have you seen starlight on the rails? Have you heard the thunder of the fast express?
Thomas Wolfe

I went down along the Ohio this past weekend of equinox, stayed at a retreat center near Melbourne, Kentucky. I slept in a room on the third floor of a nineteenth-century convent, my windows, almost eight feet tall, faced southeast toward the river, and I opened them out onto oaks and pines and cirrus and the sounds of the distant highway and the railroad that followed the water.

The land, like the calendar, lay at the edge of fall: scattered cottonwoods, ashes and locusts rich gold and yellow, streaks of orange and red in the maples. Leaf fall was just beginning, mostly from sycamores, buckeyes and hickories: withered leaves tangled in green honeysuckles, some coming down onto acorns and hickory nuts.

There were spots of decay on undergrowth maples, holes eaten, trails left by leafminers, disease spreading across elm leaves, discoloration pushing out from penetration by insects or wind, scarlet veins eating through the paling summer greens, sometimes the change occurring from the outside fringe, invading to core. There were random, pure white leaves on honeysuckle bushes, pale orange bittersweet berries, bright red rose hips, arbitrary blanching of spicebush foliage, magenta Virginia creeper, all mixed like stained glass windows when the sun came out,

Around the buildings, long drifts of white snakeroot stood between the lawn and the woods. Down the hiking path, I found waves of late-season wildflowers, sometimes hundreds of yards of the same variety: communities of tall, yellow touch-me-nots in full bloom up and down an entire hillside, lowlands full of wood nettle going to seed, rows and rows of smartweed along dry streambeds, clusters of dark ferns across an eroded bank. As I came back, I wondered at the graveyard of nuns, perennial stand of gray crosses clustered tight, shoulder to shoulder like the wildflowers, waiting, for the mysteries to be revealed.

Late in the moonless evening, the societies of katydids and crickets repeated the chants of the retreatants. In the middle of the night, the great trains howled west along the valley toward Cincinnati, and in the morning Venus shone through the branches.

Poor Will’s Almanack for 2010 is now available. Send $16.00 (includes shipping and handling) for each copy to Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, OH 45387. For more information and to see a sample of this year’s format (or to order with a credit card), click on PRODUCTS above.