A Daybook for the Year in Yellow Springs

This sixth volume of A DAYBOOK FOR THE YEAR IN YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, is memoir, extended meditation and guidebook to the month of May in southwestern Ohio – as well as in the Middle Atlantic region and much of the East and Southeast. The principal habitat described here is that of Glen Helen, a preserve of woods and glades that forms the eastern border of the village of Yellow Springs in southwestern Ohio. The passages from ancient and modern writers ( 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 also become a kind of a cosmological scrapbook for me, as well as the philosophical underpinning of this narrative. 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.

This fifth volume of A DAYBOOK FOR THE YEAR IN YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, is memoir, extended meditation and guidebook to the month of May in southwestern Ohio – as well as in the Middle Atlantic region and much of the East and Southeast.The principal habitat described here is that of Glen Helen, a preserve of woods and glades that forms the eastern border of the village of Yellow Springs in southwestern Ohio.

A Memoir in Nature and a Handbook for the Month, Being a Personal Narrative and Synthesis of Common Events in Nature between 1981 and 2023 in Southwestern Ohio, with Applications for the Lower Midwest and Middle Atlantic Region, Containing Weather Guidelines and a Variety of Natural Calendars, Reflections by the Author and Seasonal Quotations from Ancient and Modern Writers

By Bill Felker

This memoir gathers together quotations about time and nature, meteorological commentary made up from my lengthy obsession with tracking the weather, extensive notes about common events in nature, syntheses of these events and astronomical information based on my years of writing almanacs. Although I have organized my writing on a scaffolding of backyard natural history and observation, I am not a naturalist and have had no training in the natural sciences. All of what is contained in the Daybook is the result of my search for myself and for meaning.This particular aspect of my search began in 1972 with the gift of a barometer.

By Bill Felker

The format of all my notes in this daybook owes more than a little to the almanacs I wrote and continue to write for the Yellow Springs News between 1984 and 2017. The 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.

By Bill Felker