Bill Felker

Poor Will’s Almanack for the First Week of Deep Winter.

I had been reading predictions about the end of the world (on the occasion of the alignment of this December’s solstice with the Galactic equator, a once-in-twenty-six-thousand-years event, foretold by the ancient Mayans). All that foolishness, along with the longest nights of the year, had somehow set me off balance, and I decided to go and see for myself what was happening in the real world of the woods.

I walked along the river, the water higher than it had been in months.

Poor Will's Almanack for the final week of Early Winter.

In a warm winter morning not long ago, in soft rain, the grass outside my door was lush and bright, the last Osage leaves golden above the shed. Along the west wall of the house, wild onions were getting lanky, motherwort was bushy, one Queen Anne’s lace plant have grown back two-feet tall.

Poor Will's Almanack for the third week of Early Winter.

In one of Aldo Leopold’s journals, that famous naturalist observed that the rate at which solar energy flows to and through living things not only affects the rate at which plants sprout, grow, flower, and die, but might also have some influence over human lives and the course of human events.

Seasonal affective disorder, a recently named malady that appears to be tied to a lack of sunlight, is one example of an event in human physiology that is tied to solar intensity.

Poor Will's Almanack for the second week of Early Winter.

Two thousand years ago, the Roman naturalist, Pliny praised the cold northern winds as the "healthiest of all."

During the eighteenth century, physicians said the same thing. For example, William Currie wrote that "the winds which prevail during the greatest part of winter… though they are severe and piercing cold...give vigor to the constitution and a freshness and bloom to the complexion."

Poor Will's Almanack for the First Week of Early Winter.

When I read the journals of the naturalist Henry David Thoreau for the first time, I wanted him to tell me more about himself. I thought that all his notes on the thickness of ice at Walden Pond or about the dates the asters bloomed were frivolous.

I wanted him to talk, just once, about his most secret passions. I wanted him to stop hiding behind nature.