The last of fall’s crickets die in the cold November nights

November 20 – 26, 2021

Whence is it, that the flow’res of the field doth fade,

And lieth buried long in winter’s bale?

Yet, soon as spring his mantle hath displayed,

It flow’reth fresh, as it should never fail?

— Edmund Spenser

The Moon and Sun and Meteors

As it wanes through the remainder of the week, the Moon reaches apogee, its benign position farthest from Earth on November 20 at 9:00 p.m. Rising in the evening and setting in the daytime, this Moon passes overhead in the middle of the night. Fish and game activity could be greatest at that time and at the second-best lunar period, the middle of the day. As the barometer falls in advance of the November 24 cold front, activity should increase.

Keep watching for the Leonid meteors until the 21st in the east in Leo after 12:00 a.m. Leo will be located behind Orion, well up in the eastern sky.

On November 22, 2021, the Sun enters its Deep Winter sign of Sagittarius.

Weather Trends

Chances of weather in the 60s are still 50/50, but a high in the 70s only happens once in 20 years this time of year, and days in the 30s and 40s are becoming common. Full moon on the 19th increases the likelihood of chilly temperatures, especially as it travels through its third quarter (after full Moon).

Zeitgebers (Events in Nature that Tell the Time of Year)

Climbing bittersweet opens in the woods. Hardy forsythia leaves are giving way to the cold and rain

Craneflies are half grown; they become more obvious as some of the few insects out in the November weather.

The last crickets die in the cold nights. Autumn violets end their season beside the woodland paths. In warm autumns, spring’s new henbit can be budding.

Sugar maples, burned by frost, gradually drop their foliage. Almost every junco has arrived for winter. Indoors, your Christmas cactus has started to bud, maybe even flower.

Decorative pear leaves fall near this date, creating a major change in the suburban landscapes, which favor these hardy ornamental trees.

Mind and Body

The S.A.D. Index, which measures seasonal stress on a scale from 1 to 100, remains in the 70s and 80s throughout the period, indicating that the length of the day, the weather, cloud cover and the power of the Moon will influence emotions more than any time so far in the autumn. Also expect increased levels of arthritis pain as the cold fronts of November 20 and 24 approach the region. If you keep track of your physical ailments on a graph, comparing them with a graph of barometric highs and lows, you could find that the weather has more to do with your health than you thought.

In the Field and Garden

In the fields, most winter wheat has sprouted. Under the late autumn sky, the sugar beet harvest has ended.

Mulch the wet perennial beds to prevent drying. Around the yard, stake young shrubs and trees. Wrap young transplants to protect them against frost cracking. Clean up the last of the garden weeds.

In southern counties, tobacco stripping is well underway, and traditional tobacco markets open as November’s fourth week begins.

Cut wood throughout the rest of the month under the waning Moon. Test and feed your garden soil.

Journal

The temporal countryside takes on its autumnal contours from the increasingly violent movements of the Earth’s atmosphere as it tilts away from the sun.

Graphs of barometric pressure reveal many of the topographical patterns of the season. August’s barometric configurations are slow and gentle like low, rolling dunes. Heat waves show up as wide plateaus. Thunderstorms are sharp, shallow troughs in the mellow waves of the atmospheric landscape.

At the close of Late Summer, the year has begun its ascent to the steep cliffs of December. By the end of September, the barometric waves are stronger; the high-pressure peaks become taller; the lows are deeper, with almost every valley bringing rain.

Tapering floral sequences and the gradual surge of leafturn occur amid the diminishing prairie of summer. From the broad lowland of warmth with its six months of birdsong and its hundred days of insect calls, the Sun pulls the land up into the chilly foothills of the year where only asters and goldenrod bloom and where trees are gold and red.

Late Fall is the rough piedmont of another country, stripping foliage, putting buds into dormancy, burning away the undergrowth with frost and revealing the dark hillsides.

At the start of Early Winter, December’s great range of cold and snow fills the horizon. Beyond it lies another immense upland, the frigid, high plateau of Deep Winter in which nothing ever seems to grow or change until the ground crumbles and gives way, shattered by thaws, and time tumbles down into the sudden, stormy gorge of March.