Commentary

Early in the afternoon of the recent solar eclipse, I was cutting back zinnias in my garden.

Sparrows  chirped off and on and cicadas buzzed and cardinals and crows called once in a while.

A friend had called the day before. And he said he had heard that birds stopped singing in the middle of a solar eclipse as though they thought night had arrived.

Hurricane season lasts for a few more weeks. The US has been fortunate over the past few years because there haven’t been many direct hits on the mainland, but this year the hurricanes just keep coming. Sustainability commentator Bob Brecha takes a look at what we should expect for the future with warming oceans.

I left for New York in the fog and mist, and then an hour later, I drove into low, dark stratus clouds, and the wind came in strong from the northeast against me. The colors of middle autumn that would have been so rich and bright against the blue sky seemed dull and ominous to me. I looked for murmurations of starlings spinning together over the brown fields, but there seemed to be no life at all in the landscape. Traffic was loud and heavy all the way across Ohio and Pennsylvania. 

Everything is telling time, revealing the arrival of middle autumn.

The Pleiades, and the Hyades of Taurus, outrides of winter’s Orion, lie on the eastern horizon after dark, promising December.

The Big Dipper at midnight tells the progress of the year. When its pointers, Merak and Dubhe, point north-south, and the Dipper lies tight against the northern horizon, the northern hemisphere has left summer behind. Leaves are turning, birds migrating, wildflower time closing, the farm and garden take their harvest. The seasons of early, middle and late autumn pass through your habitat.

Between full summer and the final leafdrop of early December, many separate micro seasons blend with one another, the flowers of August sometimes lasting into early fall, the flowers of September sometimes blooming out of turn before late summer, sometimes the trees keeping their green and leaves well toward middle autumn.