A DAYBOOK FOR JULY IN YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO

Description

The DAYBOOK FOR JULY IN YELLOW SPRINGS offers a day-by-day description of the progress of  common events in nature during the month. Covering most years between 1981 and 2023, it offers the most complete portrait currently available of this period of the year in southwestern Ohio.

 

 

The Daybook Format

Here are no stories told you of what is to be seen at the

other end of the world, but of things at home, in your own Native

Countrey, at your own doors, easily examinable with little travel,

less cost, and very little hazard. This book doth not shew you a

Telescope, but a Mirror, it goes not about to put a delightful cheat

upon you, with objects at a great distance, but shews you

yourselves.

Joshua Childrey, 1660

The Daybook Format

The format of my notes in this daybook owes more than a

little to the almanacs I wrote for the Yellow Springs News between

1984 and 2021. The use of quotations, daily statistics, the weather

outlooks, the seasonal calendar, and the daybook journal were and

still are part of my regular routine of collecting and organizing

impressions about the place in which I live.

Setting: The principal habitat described here is that of

Glen Helen, a preserve of woods and glades that lies on the eastern

border of the village of Yellow Springs in southwestern Ohio. At

its northern edge, the Glen joins with John Bryan State Park to

form a corridor about ten miles long and half a mile wide along the

Little Miami River. The north section of the Glen Helen /John

Bryan complex is hilly and heavily wooded and is the best location1Bill Felker

for spring wildflowers. The southern portion, “South Glen” as it is

usually called, is a combination of open fields, wetlands, and

wooded flatlands. Here I found many flowers and grasses of

summer and fall. Together, the two Glens and John Bryan Park

provide a remarkable cross section of the fauna and flora of the

eastern United States.

Other habitats in the daybook journal include my yard

with its several small gardens; the village of Yellow Springs itself,

a town of about 4,000 at the far eastern border of the Dayton

suburbs; the Caesar Creek Reservoir twenty miles south of Yellow

Springs. My trips away from that environment were principally

northeast to Chicago, Madison, Wisconsin and northern

Minnesota, east to Washington and New York, southeast to the

Carolinas and Florida, southwest to Arkansas, Louisiana and

Texas, and occasionally through the Southwest to California and

the Northwest, two excursions to Belize in Central America,

several to Italy.

Quotations: The passages from ancient and modern

writers (and sometimes from my alter egos) which accompany

each day’s notations are lessons from my readings, as well as from

distant seminary and university training, here put to work in

service of the reconstruction of my sense of time and space. They

are a collection of reminders, hopes, and promises for me that I

find implicit in the seasons. They have become a kind of a

cosmological scrapbook for me and the philosophical underpinning

of this narrative.

Astronomical Data: The Daybook includes approximate

dates for astronomical events, such as star positions, meteor

showers, solstice, equinox, perihelion (the Sun’s position closest to

Earth), and aphelion (the Sun’s position farthest from Earth).

I have included the sunrise and sunset for Yellow Springs

as a general guide to the progression of the year in this location,

but those statistics also reflect trends that are world wide, if more

rapid in some places and slower in others.

Even though the day’s length is almost never exactly the

same from one town to the next, a minute gained or lost in Yellow

Springs is often a minute lost or gained elsewhere, and the Yellow

2A Daybook for July

Springs numbers can be used as a simple way of watching the

lengthening or shortening of the days, and, therefore, of watching

the turn of the planet. For those who wish to keep track of the Sun

themselves in their own location, abundant sources are now

available for this information in local and national media.

Average Temperatures: Average temperatures in

Yellow Springs are also part of each day’s entry. Since the rise and

fall of temperatures in other parts of the North America, even

though they may start from colder or warmer readings, keep pace

with the temperatures here, the highs and lows in Yellow Springs

are, like solar statistics, helpful indicators of the steady progress of

the year throughout most of the states along the 40th Parallel

(except in the mountains). The daybook journal entries can be

cross-referenced with the list of monthly average temperatures

between 1981 and 2017 in order to compare the daily inventories

with the month’s weather in a given year.

Weather: My daily, weekly and monthly weather

summaries have been distilled from over thirty years of

observations. They are descriptions of the local weather history I

have kept in order to track the gradual change in temperature,

precipitation and cloud cover through the year. I have also used

them in order to try to identify particular characteristics of each

day. They are not meant to be predictions.

Although my interest in the Yellow Springs microclimate

at first seemed too narrow to be of use to those who lived outside

the area, I began to modify it to meet the needs of a number of

regional and national farm publications for which I started writing

in the mid 1980s. And so, while the summaries are based on my

records in southwestern Ohio, they can be and have been used,

with interpretation and interpolation, throughout the Lower

Midwest, the Middle Atlantic States and the East.

The Natural Calendar: In this section, I note the

progress of foliage and floral changes, farm and garden practices,

migration times for common birds and peak periods of insect

activity. Some of these notes are second hand; I’m a sky watcher,

but not an astronomer, and I rely on the government’s astronomical

3Bill Felker

data and a few other references for much of my information about

the stars and the sun. I am also a complete amateur at bird

watching, and most of the migration dates used in the seasonal

calendar come from published sources. And even though I keep

close track of the farm year, the percentages listed for planting and

harvesting are interpretations of averages supplied by the state’s

weekly crop reports.

At the beginning of each spring and summer month, I

have included a floating calendar of blooming dates which lists

approximate flowering times for many plants, shrubs and trees in

an average Ohio Valley season. The floating chronology describes

the relationship between events more than exact dates of these

occurrences.

Although the flora of the eastern and central United States

is hardly limited to the species mentioned here, the flowers listed

are common enough to provide easily recognized landmarks for

gauging the advance of the year. I found, for example, that a record

of my drives south during April complemented the floating

calendar and allowed me to see the approximate differences

between Yellow Springs and other locations. I also learned that

April in the Lower Midwest is more like March in the Southeast

and more like May in the Upper Midwest. The Natural Calendar

summaries, then, provide guidelines for moveable feasts that shift

not only according to fixed geographical regions but also

according to the weather in any particular year.

Daybook Entries: The journal entries in the daybook

section provide the raw material from which I wrote the Natural

Calendar digests. They offer a record that anyone with a few

guidebooks could make, and they include just a small number of

the natural markers that anyone might discover.

When I began to take notes about the world around me, I

found that there were few descriptions of actual events in nature

available for southwestern Ohio. There was no roadmap for the

course of the year. My daily observations, as narrow and

incomplete as they were, were especially significant to me since I

had found no other narrative of the days, no other depiction of

what was actually occurring around me. In time, the world came

into focus with each particle I named. I saw concretely that time

4A Daybook for July

and space were the sum of their parts.

As my notes for each day accumulated, I could see the

wide variation of events that occurred from year to year; at the

same time, I saw a unity in this syncopation from which I could

identify numerous sub-seasons and with which I could understand

better the kind of habitat in which I was living and, consequently,

myself.

When I paged through the journal entries for each day, I

was drawn back to the space in which they were made. I browsed

and imagined, returned to the journey.

Journal Essays: At the end of many of the daybook

entries, I have included brief essays from my almanac column in

the Yellow Springs News.

Companions: Many friends, acquaintances and family

members have contributed their observations to the daybook, and

their participation has taught me that my private seasons are also

community seasons, and that all of our experiences together help to

lay the foundation for a rich, local consciousness.

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