Vernal Equinox: Watching the Seasons Change

For us in the Northern Hemisphere, March’s Vernal Equinox ushers in spring. Earth’s rotation around the sun makes our star appear to move north of the Equator. Our planet tilts on its axis, as the sun’s path across the sky shifts northward. Celebrations and traditions across the globe span from Cahokia in the US to Angkor Wat, Cambodia; to Chichen Itza, Mexico; to Iran to Stonehenge and beyond.

Weeks ago I walked with B. to the river flowing through the woods behind us, the water touched by late winter’s icy fingers (I can’t say the last of winter anymore, with climate change so deeply affecting all life).

Early March blooms signal spring: skunk cabbage – the incomparable, improbable flower – pokes out of the snow, actually generating its own warmth to attract pollinators…

… then follow snowdrops…

… and later, crocus – I first spied it through a window, in a forest lit by midafternoon sun. Eager for the next bulbs, I know they’ll come soon, thanks to the thoughtful planting of our home’s previous inhabitants: daffodils, then iris, later daylilies, blooms lasting into late spring.

Andromeda surprises, adorning the garden with fragrant sprays of delicate bell-like blossoms:

One rainy night a grey treefrog, the first this season, graced our back door.

Joining the neighborhood in a flurry of activity, planning and planting seeds, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, we watch as songbirds return to the feeders one by one from their winter migratory grounds. Soon will arrive their babies, their parents nourished at least partly by our seed and suet, nests replenished by our yard clippings, spent blossoms and dead leaves.

This season’s warmer, longer days literally fuel this regeneration, as unfurling leaves and buds help shake off winter blues with energy, quickening with new life.

Happy Spring!

Imbolg, Groundhog Day, and Late Winter Snow

Happy Imbolg – when we look ahead to warmer seasons – to all! This year, Punxatawney Phil of Groundhog Day fame foresaw an early spring. So far it doesn’t seem possible. A mild start to winter was followed by a January that roared in on one storm after another – a late one blanketing our surroundings in a winter wonderland whose impression lasted far longer than the snow.

I grew up on the West Coast of the US, with the dramatic granite majesty of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and silent northern forests peopled with redwood giants. I wasn’t prepared for the subtle mystery of New England woods, as they slowly reveal their beautiful secrets to me.

Following tracks in the snow, possibly coyote, fisher, and mink…

… I marvel at jewel-like icicles spilling down over precarious ledges. Snow on lichen and moss highlights cracks and crevices in bark and rock, the result of multitudinous freeze/thaw uplift cycles. Layers of gneiss were formed over millions of years of glaciation shaping this part of the world. Formed at higher temperatures and pressures than schist, gneiss makes up much of the ancient crust of continental shields – some of the oldest rocks on earth.

Icicle “falls” on layers of metamorphic gneiss

Icicles on moss, lichen, and a frozen leaf

I’m obsessed by nature’s endless patterns in water, wood, and stone. Words and photos can’t capture the thing or its essence, but that doesn’t mean we stop trying.

Stone wall from 19th century agrarian era, fallen tree trunk; three forms of water: ice, running water, snow

Winter Solstice, Yule: The Longest Night and the Return of the Light

Happy Solstice, Yule, and whatever winter holidays you celebrate! In the Northern Hemisphere, this is the first day of winter, with the year’s longest night and shortest day. The sun appears the farthest south in the sky. At the polar circles, the sun at this time does not rise at all. This year, watchers of the sky can see a special event at night, when Jupiter shines next to a nearly-full moon, as Orion falls below the horizon.

Traditions around the globe often include feasting on the bounty of the last of the harvest, singing carols, and burning logs to commemorate the coming of the light. It can be a hard time of year, with the cold and the dark, fewer hours with the sun to drive our circadian rhythms. Katherine May wrote Wintering, a beautiful meditation on the season, during a time of personal hardship, as she embraced slowing down, looking inward, healing, and accepting sadness and other difficult emotions as they arose and passed.

Here in New England, we just experienced a major Nor’Easter storm that caused flooding up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and evacuations farther north from us to prevent more loss of life. B and I hiked to the river that flows down the hill from our backyard, where we walk nearly every day to see what changes have occurred: leaves and branches down, evidence of animals passing through. This time we came upon a drowned world, where the river had overtopped our trail, as well as the forest floor surrounding it. The river was still raging, but the floodwaters had receded, and the damp sand revealed tracks of big (coyote? puma?) and little (squirrel? skunk? raccoon?) creatures who must have hopped and jumped their way around the flow. Then we spied a large wood frog – the amazing amphibian whose ability to freeze its blood over the winter is a study in resilience – out in the open, sitting in a rare sun spot. He didn’t move, and we approached slowly and quietly, to capture his stunning markings in a photo.

Ironically, the storm blew the power out on that long night, and we had our own celebration, lighting a fire and sitting for hours in the quiet, staring at the fireplace. Memories came to me from long ago of those living and those now gone, whom I felt in the room together with us still. B commented on the figures seen in the fire, blue sprites dancing in the flames as they died away into the endless night.

Samhain, Halloween, Dia de los Muertos

Samhain is an ancient Gaelic holiday marking the end of the harvest. This important festival is known as the witches’ New Year, when the darker season of winter approaches. Bonfires and hearth fires are lit, special food and drink are shared, and the veil between worlds is at its thinnest. This astronomical midpoint between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice is traditionally a time to commemorate the dead, and there is often a place set at the table for those who have been lost.

Halloween is widely believed to have sprung from the origins of Samhain, evolving its own traditions like trick-or-treating, celebrating with costume parties, reading and watching scary tales, and simultaneously reveling in and mocking death and the supernatural. Vampire pumpkins and more familiar lore about ghosts and goblins and black cats and bats are some of the holiday’s most lingering mythology. Whistling through the graveyard, anyone?

Dia de los Muertos stems from Mexican Indigenous cultural practices of honoring the dead, and also acknowledges the tenuous link between life and death. Celebrations including painting sugar skulls, decorating with bright marigolds and cutout paper papel picado, and families and friends sharing a meal with loved ones in the cemetery.

This time of year I especially mourn the loss of my mother, although she’s with me every single day. A few months ago I lost an elderly family friend who was ill for a longtime. I’ve known his widow for most of my life, she went to grade school with my mother and is her oldest friend. Now 95 years old, she takes no joy in being alive without her husband, yet I see a new liveliness in her: her personality emerges more and more clearly as she plays the piano and communicates with more people. But I know that at her age (really at any age, for any of us), death could come at anytime.

Mourning what we have lost, and what we humans are doing to the earth is the heart and soul of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, her passionate plea for integrating and communing with the land. From the chapter “Witness to the Rain”:

After hours in the penetrating rain, I am suddenly damp and chilled … but I cannot pull myself away. However alluring the thought of warmth, there is no substitute for standing in the rain to waken every sense…. Here in the rainforest, I don’t want to just be a bystander to rain, passive and protected; I want to be part of the downpour, to be soaked, along with the dark humus that squishes underfoot. Listening to rain, time disappears…. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.

So much like the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Autumnal Equinox and Fall Migration

First day of autumn, so soon! The equinox occurs when the sun appears directly overhead at the equator (fall equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, where I live, and spring in the Southern Hemisphere). I notice the days getting dramatically shorter, seems so quickly. Now is the time to gather the crops we’ve been carefully tending all year.

Black-eyed susans make themselves at home in a stray pot

Shorter days, longer nights, and lower temperatures accompanying fall’s arrival cause the breakdown of chlorophyll (which deciduous trees use to turn sunlight into sugars during photosynthesis). As the leaves’ green goes away, formerly hidden yellow and orange colors begin to reveal themselves. Sugars trapped in the leaves form anthocyanin pigments that make maples, redbuds, and other glorious fall foliage trees such a brilliant red.

Other seasonal changes triggered by lessening daylight include molecular effects in birds’ eyes that enable them to “see” the earth’s magnetic field lines to follow on their search for food and wintering grounds. This mysterious process eluded scientists’ research until just recently, and adds to the magical suite of tools birds use to migrate – in addition to using their sense of smell to detect familiar places their parents taught them, internal clocks governed by the sun, and navigating by the stars, as sailors have done for centuries.

This is the time of year plants start going to seed – literally going nuts (and berries) – all of which feed birds and other creatures scurrying around trying to fatten up and increase their winter nutrition stores before cold and scarcity set in (although these weather and behavior patterns are continually disrupted and shifting with climate change).

Enjoying his catbird seat atop the vegetable fence

Pumpkin time

Variegated pumpkin, from the same seeds!

Another pumpkin variation

Our vegetable garden was especially prolific with squash. The marigolds we planted to ward off tomato thieves really thrived, protecting the fruit from bugs, deer, and bunnies and attracting multiple pollinators. New England asters, some of my favorite fall flowers, also sustained pollinators like bees, flies, and butterflies. Many of our tomatoes got rained out, but the rain gave us lovely purple cabbage, kale, and garlic chives.

Kale and cabbage, two of our salad staples

Indigo cherry tomatoes, still ripening

Garlic chives in bloom attract bees by the dozen!

Fritillary butterfly sunbathes on her namesake bush, surrounded by goldenrod

Syrphid fly on New England asters, which attract many different pollinators …

… As do marigolds protecting the tomato plants

The rain also brought fungi as beautiful and varied as flowers. In addition, we found white ghost pipe plants in the woods, and for the first time saw their rare red brethren. These saprophites don’t contain chlorophyll (so can’t harness the sun for photosynthesis to produce sugars); they get nourishment by parasitizing red Russula mushrooms on the forest floor.

Edible chicken of the woods mushrooms fed us for days

B’s folks’ garden has delicious black chanterelles

Delicate coral fungus on the forest floor

Rare red ghost pipes in the woods

Stalked puffball in aspic, one of our oddest mushrooms

Happy Equinox to all! May everyone celebrate and share in the good fortune of this season’s bounty.

Garden supper: prolific pear tomatoes (with straggler cucumber), and cabbage leaves