This week, the day becomes shorter by about 7 minutes
These regular phenomena of the seasons get at last to be…simply and plainly phenomena or phases of my life. The seasons and all their changes are in me…. After a while I learn what my moods and seasons are. I would have nothing subtracted. I can imagine nothing added.
— Henry David Thoreau
The Moon
The Deer Rutting Moon wanes throughout the period, becoming the Sandhill Crane Migration Moon at 2:43 a.m. (and reaching perigee, its position closest to Earth) on December 4. As Early Winter moves south from Canada, sandhill cranes ride the cold waves toward the warmer temperatures of the Border States and the Deep South. Listen for their haunting cries high overhead.
Rising in the morning and setting in the evening, this Moon moves overhead in the middle of the day. Fish and hunt around that time as the barometer falls prior to cold fronts due on or about November 28 and December 3.
In the first week of December, the day becomes shorter by about seven minutes, the last time this year that the day loses that much time. Throughout most of the region, sunset is now the earliest of the year; it will remain at that time until December 13.
Weather Trends
As the Sun reaches its earliest setting time of the year at the beginning of December, Late Fall comes to a close. The coldest weather since the end of February is just ahead. But temperatures sometimes reach into the 50s or 60s before the season shifts definitively. The first December cold front usually arrives between the 1st and the 3rd, bringing a 40% chance of rain or snow on those days. The 4th and 5th are dry two years in three; the 6th, however, usually anticipates the second high pressure system of the month, and is wet half
the days in my record.
Zeitgebers (Events in Nature that Tell the Time of Year)
Markers for this week of the year include the final losses of foliage on beeches and pears. Sometimes oaks are the holdouts, sometimes forsythia, or a hardy honeysuckle.
Sometimes sweet gums and poplars keep a few leaves this late in the year; sometimes Osage, mock orange and lilacs outlast all the other trees and shrubs.
Privets are bare, their blueberries revealed. Euonymus fruits are losing their white outer shells, orange cores unveiled by the cold.
Sparrow hawks once again come to the trees, watching for mice in snowless fields. In the woods, whitetail deer enter their secondary rutting period, which lasts approximately two weeks.
Moss is still bright green on rotting logs. A few red raspberry leaves and a few red honeysuckle berries hold on.
The last woolly bear caterpillars mark one of the many borders of autumn — like the silver maple, pear and beech leaves falling, new growth on the spruce, the end of witch hazel flowers, and the first snow.
Gauges of passage appear all across the ground, the Osage fruits decaying, sometimes opened and scattered by squirrels, the hulls of black walnuts pocked and stained, heaps of leaves darkening, settling, contracting, dissolving, buried in snow.
Mind and Body
The S.A.D. Index, which measures seasonal stress on a scale from 1 to 100, rises on the power of the New Moon, reaching into the harsh 80s for most of December’s first week.
In the Field and Garden
The dark lunar phase makes this a perfect lunar week for planting all your indoor bulbs.
The week is also excellent for all livestock maintenance activities, especially worming, vaccinations, crutching and facing ewes, dipping for parasites and trimming feet.
The last outdoor bulb planting (including the garlic crop) and perennial transplanting should be done in anticipation of the arrival of early winter next week.
Order legume seed for winter pastures. Schedule your frost seeding for January and
February.
If you seed spring spinach, you could have greens in April. Under lights sow the last of the earliest bedding plants now for your spring sales and color.
Fertilize pastures now for improved winter hardiness and spring development.
If you are still transplanting, be sure to water deeply before the ground freezes.
It is as bad to study stars and clouds as flowers and stones ....
Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object. Let it come to you.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, September 13, 1852
As the Sun moves across the late autumn sky, it shines further and further into my south-facing window. Paying attention to where and when it enters my house allows me to track the seasons toward and away from winter solstice.
When I watch the sunlight move across my walls, I feel like I am not only following time made visible, but I am also finding myself in relation to the tilt of Earth.
My relationship with the Sun is different when I am outside. In the yard or the woods or on the road, the Sun is diffuse, has no limits. It shines everywhere, belongs to everything and to every creature. Even the warmth of the Sun on my face on cold mornings seems accidental and impersonal.
But when I am inside watching it on the wall in my room, the Sun feels more intimate. Shaped by the frame of my south windows, its light is not only tame but mine. It has come to me. I am the only one who sees it here now. It is not so vast and almighty as it appears filling the sky. It is not the indifferent prime mover of the day and night.
Instead, it seems a bright blessing and a personal ally against the winter ahead.
Poor Will’s Almanack for 2022 is now available.
Order from www.amazon. com or visit www.poorwillsalmanack.com to look at a sample of this year’s features and to order an autographed copy of your book. You may also order by sending a $22 check for each autographed copy (includes priority mail before Christmas) to Poor Will at P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387.