Seasonal stress likely lightens because of weakening lunar position

Great rumors are afloat in the air of a great and coming change. We are eager for Winter to be gone…. But he will not abdicate without a struggle. Day after day he rallies his scattered forces, and night after night pitches his white tents on the hills, and would fain regain his lost ground; but the young prince in every encounter prevails. Slowly and reluctantly the gray old hero retreats up the mountain, until finally the south rain comes in earnest, and in a night he is dead.

— John Burroughs

THE FINAL WEEK OF LATE WINTER The twelfth week of the natural year

Lunar phase and lore

The Lambing and Kidding Moon wanes throughout the remainder of the period, entering its final quarter at 5:18 p.m. on February 15.

Rising in the middle of the night and setting in the early afternoon, this moon passes overhead in the morning, calling fish to bite at that time, especially as the February 15 cold front approaches.

Seasonal stress is likely to lighten because of weakening lunar position, contributing to increased chances for optimism and cheer. Even though clouds often continue to deprive the human brain of the benefits of sunlight, the length of the day complements the slowly improving temperatures..

If you have pregnant sheep, goats or other creatures, the moon’s third quarter (the week after full Moon), is the lunar period most likely to bring early birthing.

Weather trends

The worst weather of the winter is likely with full moon on the 9th and lunar perigee on the 10th. On the other hand, although the February 15 high-pressure ridge can be chilly, the aftermath of this cold wave brings increasing odds for the best thaw so far in the year. Since mild winds from the Gulf of Mexico are likely to clash with Arctic air during this period, however, the days between the 14th and 18th bring an increased likelihood of storms.

The countdown to spring

■ One week to the very first snowdrop blossom and the official start of Early Spring and the major pussy willow emerging season

■ Two weeks to crocus season

■ Three weeks to the beginning of the morning robin chorus before sunrise

■ Four weeks to daffodil time

■ Five weeks to the early wildflower bloom and the flowering of cornus mas shrubs

■ Six weeks until the yellow blossoms of forsythia bushes appear, and skunk cabbage sends out its first leaves, and the lawn is long enough to cut

■ Seven weeks to tulip season and the peak of Middle Spring wildflowers in the woods, and until American toads sing their mating songs in the dark, and corn planting time begins

■ Eight weeks until the Great Dandelion and Violet Bloom is underway

■ Nine weeks to the full bloom of flowering fruit trees

■ Ten weeks until the first rhubarb pie

In the field and garden

Honeybees may emerge from their hives to look for skunk cabbage when the temperature rises into the 50s. Frustrated bees may appreciate a serving of sugar syrup and a pollen substitute.

Separate dahlia clumps into single roots. Complete indoor repair and painting projects while the cold weather lasts.

Pull back garden mulch to allow soil to dry out and warm up. Repair arbors and trellises. Dig horseradish, dandelion and comfrey roots before the weather begins to moderate. Onions may be planted in the ground as soon as the soil can be properly prepared.

Spray trees with dormant oil when temperatures are in the upper 30s or 40s. The best chances of experiencing those temperatures will occur between February 15 and 23.

Budburst time begins in the most precocious maple trees, the new green barely visible in the swollen buds. If you drive deep into the South, you will see budburst gradually turning the tree line pale yellow green.

Journal

I was walking beside the river into Mint Hollow with my bulldog, Buttercup. The afternoon was windy and rainy, full of the scent of the thawing ground.

I was thinking, while I walked, about spring and about Lent and Easter coming, and then about childhood Irish Catholic fasting and abstinence this time of year, of small change given up for “pagan babies” in distant lands, rosaries said after supper, the family praying for world peace, for distant uncles and aunts, for all the war dead, for the Pope and for secret intentions.

Those were Wisconsin Lents, with no possibility of a thaw until late March, darker afternoons than these, the ground covered with snow at least until Easter. When that feast finally arrived, even though the cold stayed, the wind came from the south more often, and the ice on puddles gave way easily to my rubber boots.

I practiced the Church year ritual until my early twenties. Then I left that structure behind for a complex of reasons, which included disagreements over dogma, rubric, liturgy and policy. I became embarrassed by the clericalism, the jargon, the exclusivity, and the bad taste of formal Catholic practice. I took up instead something of Bertrand Russell’s philosophy expressed so exquisitely in A Free Man’s Worship.

In Russell’s vision of humanity cut off from the eternal, I found a brave defiance against death and a noble alternative to an intrusive Church. I still have my copy of his essay, well worn.

One of the more pointed passages I underlined in the early 1960s: “Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow fall, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.”

Here to me was the ultimate self-sufficiency: the freedom from God, the freedom to define myself by my own grace, not His. Having been tyrannized so long by fear and guilt, I embraced Russell’s gallant earthly heaven, and I tried to become his heroic human who, having given up hopes of a demeaning paradise, worshipped “at the shrine that his own hands have built, undismayed by the empire of chance.”

But against the powerful common sense of Russell’s position, against his careful arguments and the majesty of his ideal, my childhood rhythms have returned to assert themselves. In spite of the absurdity of Catholicism, in spite of all my disagreements with it, I find myself carefully tracking its old seasons with my outdated missal. I say the rosary now, at peace repeating Hail Marys, and I invoke the saints the way my mother taught me.

It is not a social religion that I have, nothing I can pass on or down to anyone. It seems rather the triumph of emotion and illogic, the victory of an unshakable habit over transitory reason. It seems to be the emergence of a blind and unexpected blend of my past and present, a new assertion of who I am becoming, free of institutional and biblical preconceptions, and also free from Russell’s compelling, bleak truth.

The rain turned to sleet in Mint Hollow, and then there was thunder, the first I had heard all year. The wind came up, and then snow started to fall in flakes so huge and so thick they hid the river.

Buttercup jumped at the noise, and her ears went back. She looked frightened, ran to me, scooted off up the path, then zoomed back, confused and nervous. I knelt down and held her to me, stroked her head and rubbed her back.

I told her what she heard was neither the reproach of a wrathful Irish God nor the ghastly roar of Bertrand Russell’s indifferent universe. It was, instead, I reassured her, my eyes filling with relief and tears of melodrama, the first wild and mighty call of the rising Christ of Spring.

Bill Felker’s collection of essays,“Home is the Prime Meridian: Almanack Essays in Search of Time and Place and Spirit,”is available on Amazon.