If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring may always read a new truth there. There are things there written with such fine and subtle tinctures, paler than the juice of limes, that to the diurnal eye they leave no trace, and only the chemistry of night revels them.
Henry David Thoreau
The other side of August is February. As midsummer flowers die back and the foliage of trees and shrubs weathers from heat and age, the parallel universe of spring is balancing the loss. Even though the landscape of late summer shows little kinship with its opposite, the land in late winter, the night sky reveals the year’s duality.
Dark brings the Summer Triangle close to the center of the sky. Arcturus is setting and Perseus is rising. The Milky Way splits the heavens in two. It is the daytime sky of the midwinter thaw made visible, a prophecy that everything, indeed, is exactly balanced.
A linear time which moved in only one direction would leave our human seasons and the seasons of the world behind as though this planet were a solitary stone hurtling ever outward and away, following creation’s explosion. Loss would be irreparable, and summer would be gone with this September.
But we live tied to circles in which beginnings and endings are the spin of an orbital coin. Thoreau’s new page, the firmament of soft February’s noon, “paler than the juice of limes,” comes true at midnight in the time of ragweed and goldenrod, love vine and beggarticks, when honeysuckle berries ripen, and hickory nuts and black walnuts drop to the grass.