By Bill Felker Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.... In August live on berries.... Be blown by all the winds.... Grow green with spring, yellow and ripe with autumn. Drink of each season’s influence as a vial, a true panacea of all remedies mixed for your special use. – Henry David Thoreau The Fifth Week of Late Summer The Moon, the Sun, the Planets and the Stars The Starling Murmuration Moon waxes throughout the period, reaching perigee its powerful position closest to Earth on Sept. 7 at 1 p.m. and then becoming full at 4:59 a.m. on the 10th. The sun, beginning the month at +8 degrees, 34 minutes, falls quickly to +5 degrees 37 minutes by Sept. 8, increasing its apparent rate of descent, the closer it comes to equinox. By sunrise, Orion has shifted to the center of the heavens. January’s Leo and its brightest star, Regulus, have come up in the east, and the Great Square is following Hercules into the ocean. Emerging before sunrise, Venus is the morning star of early autumn. Jupiter has moved to the western sky when Venus appears in the east. Mars is overhead in Taurus then, leading on Orion. Saturn remains in Capricorn, traveling along the southwestern horizon in the evening. Weather Trends Early fall comes to most of the nation with the cool front that arrives around Sept. 8, after which the Dog Days of summer typically moderate, fog forms in the early mornings, and the cycle of flowering plants comes to a close. Lunar perigee and full moon on Sept. 10 are likely to strengthen this weather system. Zeitgebers: Events in Nature that Tell the Time of Year: Squirrels are shredding Osage fruits in the woods. Rose of Sharon has suddenly lost most of its flowers. Japanese knotweed flowers darken and fall. False boneset begins to lose its brightness along the freeways. Bright blue ironweed is now deteriorating quickly, yellow wingstem in its last week. White and violet asters, orange beggarticks and bur marigolds, late field goldenrod, and zigzag goldenrod come into bloom, blending with the last of the purple ironweed, yellow sundrops, blue chicory, golden touch-me-nots, showy coneflowers and great blue lobelias. Leaves accumulate in the backwaters and on sidewalks and paths. Patches of scarlet sumac and Virginia creeper mark the fencerows. Some black walnuts and cottonwoods are almost bare. Streaks of gold have appeared on the silver olive bushes. In the garden and on your walks through the woods or countryside, look for the last skipper and blue butterflies, the last Viceroys, Red Admirals and Great Spangled Fritillaries; in most years, they end their seasons in September. Rose Breasted Grossbeaks and Indigo Buntings are often gone by the end of the week, and almost all types of warblers are on the move. In the Field and Garden Soybean leaves are turning gold from Georgia to North Dakota, and pods could be set on almost all of the acreage. Pickle season is usually over by now. Peach picking may be done for the year. The field corn harvest begins in average years as almost all the corn is usually in dough. Grapes are being picked as the first asters bloom in the pasture. In a typical year, more than half of the tobacco is cut. The tomato harvest is 70 percent gathered. Potatoes are often 70 percent dug. Mind and Body Light depression, sometimes called the September Blues, may follow the major changes taking place in the landscape and in personal or family life. This is back-to-school time for children and parents, and whether you are heading off to class or staying home alone, you may have mixed feelings about the new patterns. The S.A.D. Stress Index (which measures the forces thought to be associated with Seasonal Affective Disorder on a scale from 1 to 100) affirms these challenges by measuring the power of the new season, rising to the troublesome 40s as the moon waxes. Gardening and God Retrospective by Bill Felker “It’s as good as going to church,” said Orlando Brown about his gardening, when I talked to him in the late winter of 1985. “And that’s not to say I don’t go to church.” Brown, who moved to the Ohio Valley in 1955, grew up during hard times in West Virginia. “When I was a kid, we practically subsisted off the land. We raised hogs, chickens; we had our own hatchery. And the garden was just part of how we lived.” That was where Brown learned about the “Good Lord and the soil.” “I think the gardener, the farmer, feels a relationship between God and the soil. Everyone who works the earth has to have direct relationship with the Lord.” Pressed to explain his theology of the land, Brown smiled. He looked out at the snow-covered February garden. “It’s the whole process, and you find God in it. “First it’s the anticipation of the season. Spring is on the way. You feel it in the wind. Then there’s the anticipation about the weather. You wait for the soil to become dry enough. Then there’s the seed selection. And then once the seeds are in the ground, I know I’ve got something coming, and I go out every day to watch for it.” Sue Jackson, who managed the nearby Garden Mart at that time, shared a similar sense of wonder, and she told me she felt a strong spiritual element in her attraction to the land. “In a major way, that’s why I do what I do, It’s miraculous...the growing cycle, and when you enter into that cycle, you become aware of the overwhelming scope of the universe.” When I talked about all this to Wayne Albertson, minister at the local Methodist church, he supported Orlando and Sue’s attitude, even telling me that a slice of fresh tomato from the garden, combined with a fresh slice of onion, could take the “Good Lord and the soil” one step further. “Those two slices can prove the existence of God,” he declared. To a skeptical glance, Rev. Albertson responded: “You know there’s nothing like picking something warm from the garden. There’s nothing like going out after a rain. Your senses of sound and sight and smell are so alive. You take that tomato and onion. You cut them. You make a sandwich! “And you ask yourself then: ‘Is the universe friendly?’ “And you know, at least for that brief instant, that it IS friendly; the world, at that moment, is benign.” *** Send your memory stories to Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, OH 45387. Five dollars will be paid to any author whose story appears in this column. *** ANSWERS TO LAST WEEK’S SCKRAMBLER In order to estimate your SCKRAMBLER IQ, award yourself 15 points for each word unscrambled, adding a 50-point bonus for getting all of them correct. If you find a typo, add another 15 points to your IQ. FLCKRIE FLICKER EIURKCQ QUICKER RQLOUI LIQUOR CARVI VICAR KERCIW WICKER EIKCNKR KNICKER ERECKI KICKER REKLIC LICKER RECKIS SICKER KCILSRE SLICKER THIS WEEK’S RHYMING SCKRAMBLER ERVECL VEER REELV VEREN EEAORVDN EEORVWH WHNVREEE EEARVTWH EREVIHHCW REVES Copyright 2022 – W. L. Felker |
