A Phenology Resource
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
In his poem, “Gardens,” the Spanish author, Jorge Guillen, suggests that the strata of deep time are cumulative and that such compression and blending bring years and events together, meld them and make the soul. ‘In these essays, most of which I wrote for my column in the Yellow Springs News, I look for those strata and try to tell my story with them. It is a story about finding the seasons, and discovering home and myself, about my engagement with and disengagement from Roman Catholic liturgy and theology, the sacred time of the Church year becoming a complement to the sacred stories of nature’s cycles. As I explored nature close to my home, I found a wider garden entangled with the layers of my emotions and ideas. My notes took the form of a daybook from which I made an almanac with which I follow the year over and over. Most days I write an entry about the weather or what is blooming or not blooming in the garden, what is happening to the trees or with the birds. Each entry follows the previous entries for the same day and that sequencing seems to compress time for me, ties the years together with a cord of attention and recollection.In my daybook notes, I find that the repetition of events in nature from year to year creates a kind of radial time, a deep time that connects cycles and removes the distinction between experience and memory. Repetition is the source of temporal layering, which is the scaffodilng of deep time. With memory, repetition and layering blur the line between one summer and the next. All summers become one summer. The observation of one flower during one year becomes indistinguishable from similar observations in the past. Change becomes static, consciousness free. Repeated practices become a path to home and self. Many gardens become one garden, a “clarity of so many afternoons, together forever.”
By Bill Felker
The Weather Book of Poor Will’s Almanack contains daily, weekly and monthly weather summaries applicable to most regions east of the Mississippi River along and near the 40th Parallel. The summaries provide data about what kind of weather has occurred in the past and what kind of weather is likely in the future. In addition, The Weather Book contains directions about how to use its information to make general forecasts.
By Bill Felker
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THE VIRGIN POINT: MEDITATIONS IN NATURE Currently available through Amazon for $15.00 This collection of…
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