Changes in the weather transform the very feel of the world’s presence, altering the medium of awareness in a manner that affects every breathing being in our vicinity. We sometimes refer to such weather phenomena, taken together, as “the elements,” a phrase that suggests how basic, how primary, these powers are to the human organism. – David Abram, Becoming Animal, An Earthly Cosmology

Phases of the Tufted Titmouse Moon

Jan. 19: The moon is new.

Jan. 26: The moon enters its second quarter.

The Sun

The Sun enters its sign of Aquarius on the 20th, foreshadowing late winter. And the day’s length is approaching a spring-like 10 hours along the 40th Parallel.

Weather Trends

After the January thaw, the likelihood of crueler conditions increases briefly, sometimes making the 25th and 26th some of the coldest days of the month. Jan. 26 is also the first day of the season of late winter. Late winter contains five to six cold fronts and lasts through Feb. 18.

Although the 31st can bring subfreezing temperatures 40 percent of the time, that day introduces the possibility of a high in the 60s for the first time since Jan. 7. Between the 26th and 28th, dry conditions prevail 75 percent of the years, and the 27th is the usually sunniest day in January, bringing an 80 percent chance for clear to partly cloudy skies. The 30th is the cloudiest day in the second half of January, with a 70 percent chance for overcast conditions and precipitation.

The Countdown to Spring

• One week until the traditional January Thaw time and blue jays give their bell-like mating call

• Two weeks until cardinals start to sing before dawn. Flies and cabbage butterflies sometimes hatch on indoor plants

• Three weeks until doves join the cardinals, and maple sap is running

• Three and a half weeks until the first red-winged blackbirds arrive in the wetlands

• Four weeks until the very first snowdrop bloom and the official start of early spring

• Five weeks to major pussy willow emerging season

• Six weeks to crocus season

• Seven weeks to the beginning of the morning robin chorus before sunrise

• Eight weeks to daffodil time

• Nine weeks to the major wildflower bloom

• 10 weeks until the yellow blossoms of forsythia bushes appear

In the Field and Garden

There is no better time than the dark moon in January to force daffodils and tulips into bloom. If you don’t have any, go out and cut a pussy will branch, put it in some nice warm sugar water and then watch March appear.

Frost seeding typically begins at this time of the year: red clover is broadcast in the fields, and grass seed is scattered over bare spots on the lawn.

Reserve your spring chicks for March, April or May so they can gain weight throughout the summer and be ready to lay by late summer and early autumn.

Rhubarb leaves emerge in the sun, and Lenten roses are budding. Those farmers and gardeners who fly to central Florida for a January vacation can find elderberries and azaleas blooming in milder years. Calves and lambs will be out in the fields throughout the warm South.

Plan and fertilize while the weather is still cold. Winter fertilizing not only frees up time in the spring for the many farm and garden chores that follow warm weather, but it provides a modicum of insurance against spring rain delays. The frozen soil of winter also resists compaction from heavy equipment.

In late winter, treat ash, bittersweet, fir, elm, flowering fruit trees, hawthorn, juniper, lilac, linden, maple, oak, pine, poplar, spruce, sweet gum, tulip tree and willow for scales and mites. Spray trees when temperatures rise into the upper 30s or 40s.

Do your winter pruning under this week’s dark moon. Start your worm farm, too.

The pre-Lenten carnival marketing season begins near this date, about a month before Mardi Gras.

The Easter Market (mid-April this year) is a major marketing time for lambs and kids. Explore the Passover Market, too.

Natural Calendar

Now as the day lengthens, the advance of spring quickens.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, just as the sun comes into Aquarius.

This is also the week opossums and raccoons become more active, and they appear at night along the backroads. Once you see these small mammals, then you know for sure late winter is on the way. Skunk cabbage is up in the swamps, blackened by the cold but still strong. Watercress holds in the streams. Where the ground is not frozen, new mint grows under the protection of a southern hedge or wall. In the pastures, basal leaves of thistles and mullein are deep green beneath the snow. In town, winter-blooming hellebores and Chinese witch hazels blossom in the warmest microclimates.

As the thaws move north from Kentucky, remnants of the past year no longer point back to October. On the hillsides, the springs are clear and the vegetation bright. New chickweed covers parts of the bottomland. Basal foliage of sweet rocket and leafcup is lush and tall, waiting for April and May.

As you walk through the wetlands in the January Thaw, small, pale moths may follow you, and you may see crayfish crawling along through the shallow water.

Journal

The ice on the river had broken up, and the great thaw was underway. My bulldog, Buttercup, and I followed the paths up and along the hills. It was late in the afternoon. The sky had been gray all day, now was darker with storm clouds. We walked through flurries, sometimes a shower of sleet. At first, the noise from the cars along the road intruded on our privacy, but as we moved further back into the woods, the rush of the flooding river and the rising wind swallowed up highway sounds.

Much of the snow of the past week had melted. The land was a patchy gray and black, brown and deep green. Even after the recent record-low temperatures, chickweed was still bright, and garlic mustard, aster, henbit, wild strawberry, ground ivy, and sweet rocket leaves pushed out through the ice.

Deer tracks were visible in what was left of the snow. They were the only tracks I saw. Buttercup seemed not to notice them, preferred to romp and frisk, bite at sticks, climb over the stumps of fallen trees.

The water was as high as I’d ever seen it. Usually clear and shallow, it was deep and fast and full of mud after two days of rain and melting snow. Buttercup was nervous at its power, walked to the riverbank, then scampered back to me shaking, excited and afraid.

I walked with her, thinking how low this same river had been in the drought of 1988, how it had seemed so vulnerable and ephemeral then, how the fish had gathered in the deeper pools, huddled together against the increasing warmth and stagnation of the current and the mysterious withdrawal of the earth’s life force.

Today, there was none of that old fragility, and Wendell Berry’s poem on the second coming of the wilderness ran through my mind. I was standing, I imagined, in front of what Berry called “a resurrection of the wild.”

This flood was like a sudden, sweeping memory of a massive waterway 15,000 years ago when humans were just beginning to hunt in the newly formed hills and when this excess would have been only low tide of that ancient global warming, the collapse of the Ice Age filling the hollows with snowmelt.

I wondered if the flood might also be a prophesy of this place 15,000 years from now, the valley filling again in the long storms of another climate, the river rising to cleanse the land of all our impurities, purging itself of our waste. Our words and structures would have disappeared by then, those people who might remain alive having no more knowledge of us than I of the fur-clad hunters and their wolf-dogs who tracked the ancestors of today’s deer, men and women who stood in this same place as Buttercup and I and who wondered what might someday come to pass.