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. My wife, Jeanie, gave the instrument to me when I was succumbing to graduate school stress in Knoxville, Tennessee, and it became not only an escape from intense academic work, but the first step on the road to a different kind of awareness about the world. A short apprenticeship told me when important changes would occur and what kind of weather would take place on most any day. That information was expressed in the language of odds and percentages, and it was surprisingly accurate. Taking into consideration the consistency of certain patterns in the past, I could make fairly successful predictions about the likelihood of the repetition of such paradigms in the future. As Yeats says, the seasons "have their fixed returns," and I found points all along the course of the year which appeared to be fixed moments for change. The pulse of the world was steadier than I had ever imagined. From watching the weather, it was an easy step to watching wildflowers. Identifying plants, I saw that flowers were natural allies of my graphs, and that they were parallel measures of the seasons and the passage of time. I kept a list of when each wildflower blossomed and saw how each one consistently opened around a specific day, and that even though a cold year could set blooming back up to two weeks, and unusual warmth accelerate it, average dates were quite useful in establishing sequence of bloom which always showed me where I was in the progress of the year. In the summer of 1978, Jeanie and I took the family to Yellow Springs, Ohio, a small town just beyond the eastern edge of the Dayton suburbs. We bought a house and planned to stay. I began to write a nature almanac for the local newspaper. To my weather and wildflower notes I added daily sunrise and sunset times, moonrise and moonset, average and record temperatures, comments on foliage changes, bird migration dates, farm and gardening cycles and the rotation of the stars. The more I learned about Yellow Springs, the more I found applicable to the world beyond the village limits. The microclimate in which I immersed myself gradually became a key to the extended environment; the part unlocked the whole. My Yellow Springs gnomon that measured the movement of the Sun also measured my relationship to every other place on Earth. My occasional trips turned into exercises in the measurement of variations in the landscape. When I drove 500 miles northwest, I not only entered a different space, but often a separate season, and I could mark the differences in degrees of flowers, insects, trees and the development of the field crops. The most exciting trips were taken south in March. I could travel from Early Spring into Middle Spring and finally into Late Spring and Early Summer along the Gulf Coast. My engagement with the natural world, which began as an escape from academia, finally turned into a way of getting private bearings and of finding what I loved and believed. It was a process of spiritual as well as physical reorientation. In that way, all the historical statements in this collection of notes are the fruit of a strong desire to define where I am and what happens around me.
About the Author: Bill Felker has been writing almanacs for papers and magazines since 1984, and he has published his annual "Poor Will's Almanack" since 2003. His radio version of "Poor Will" is broadcast weekly on NPR station WYSO and is available on podcast. His first book of essays, "Home is the Prime Meridian: Essays in Search of Time and Place and Spirit," was published in 2017 and is available on Amazon. A second collection of essays and the entire twelve volumes of "A Daybook for the Year in Yellow Springs" will be available by early 2019