Commentary

When winter approaches, I sometimes feel afraid. Often, the feeling is related to dreams I cannot remember, but it is also an old issue with me, something that often appears as a kind of autumnal uneasiness.

The fears, like a kind of stomachache or cramp, dissolve the more awake I become. Exercise and coffee and list-making pretty much make them go away. Still, they lurk at the back of my mind like the effects an insidious seasonal neurotic disorder.

As the last leaves of the year come down, seed catalogs start arriving in my mailbox, and I plan for spring under the Bedding Plant Seeding Moon.  Usually, I order a few packages of geraniums, coleus and petunias, and I start them under grow lights close to the furnace, which happens to be in the attic. 

If I keep the soil warm, well watered and close to the fluorescent bulbs, the seeds germinate within a week or so and then develop steadily throughout the winter.

The foliage was still thick and lush when I entered the familiar woods one late September afternoon. I used to know those trails well, but now they had become overgrown, wilder than they were decades ago.

The path was not marked, but I felt I knew where I was going. How could anyone get lost here? It never crossed my mind. I wandered and daydreamed, not paying attention to where I was going.

A little rain then flurries about noon, then this afternoon, hazy sky, white sun low in the southwest, I walked along the brooks, water higher than it had been in weeks, and all around me the chickweed was rising through the mulch of the last honeysuckle leaves, through the crumbling strata of summer and fall, along the banks of the river, and up the wooded talus slopes, and there was garlic mustard, too, and sweet rockets and fresh wild onions and slippery ragwort leaves and floppy leafcup in between the trunks of fallen trees covered with moss and mushrooms.

The role of coal as an energy source is diminishing in this country.  Ten years ago, half of the electricity in this country came from burning coal, but today, that number has dropped to one third. The coal companies have claimed that the Obama administration is waging a WAR on Coal .   But sustainability commentator Bob Brecha isn’t so sure.

The first butterflies of the spring are easy to notice. They emerge out of April and May to seek the flowers of middle and late spring, and they are full of prophetic meaning.