Environment

Poor Will’s Almanack for the fourth week of Late Spring.

In the middle of this past January, I set twenty-five geranium seeds in a flat of moist potting soil and placed them under a growlight in the attic. Eighteen sprouts appeared in ten days and grew steadily throughout the coldest time of the year.

Although I have always had a weakness for new sprouts and spring growth, something about these geraniums was different. Maybe it was their location in the attic, that they gave life to a cluttered and neglected place of objects that had lost their relevance. No matter the reason, my reaction to the plants surprised me a little.

Poor Will’s Almanack for the third week of Late Spring.

In his journal, the poet Thomas Merton refers to the virgin point of the morning, a time just before dawn, when all beauty of the day is still waiting to become.

By this time in May it seems that the virgin point of the year is long past. It seems that point must have occurred in earliest spring, just before aconite and snow crocus bloomed, in the days before the cardinals and the doves and the robins sang before sunrise, the days before the trillium, the days before the first butterfly.

Of course, in our circular universe where beginnings and endings so often spiral together, virgin days are actually everywhere, even in the middle of May:

Poor Will’s Almanack for the second week of Late Spring

At winter solstice, the sun rose at the far southern corner of the Danielson's house across the street from my window. At equinox, the sun came up over Lil's house.

And at summer solstice, it will rise in the northwest between Jerry's house and Lil's. The original owners of these three places have moved or died, but still I use the houses to measure course of the sun and the progress of the year. But they do that only from my window. Disconnected from that view, they lose their astronomical significance.

Poor Will’s Almanack for the first week of Late Spring.

Some people I know have been a little uneasy with the beautiful spring weather this year.

At first, the sun and heat were were great blessings. For a while, everyone was excited by the abrupt end of winter - by the lack, in fact, of any appreciable winter at all. For a while, I went around saying, "I love global warming!"

But as I kept recording what was happening, I realized that March in my location of southwestern Ohio was looking like March in Savannah, Georgia. Things were even more extreme where my sisters lived in Wisconsin.