Book of Days

Our great big Earth constantly is shifting in its seat and tonight in the Northern Hemisphere, in the overnight hours betwixt Tuesday and Wednesday, we will reach a time of balance: It is the autumnal equinox. Ever since the Midsummer solstice in June we’ve been losing a bit of daylight with each passing day, and now, halfway between Midsummer and Midwinter, things are balanced. But only briefly, for almost as soon as the balance is reached, the planet’s shifting continues and darkness now begins to overtake light.

We see this constant rearrange in ways both obvious and subtle. The obvious thing we notice is that the sun rises much later and sets much earlier now than it did at Midsummer. The subtle things are more fleeting in nature: when I drive due east toward home after work the sun is setting and shining now right in my eyes through my rear view mirrors. At home, Haden the Convivio Shopcat is spending more time pressed up against the south windows as the sun dips lower in the sky; the sunlight streams again into those windows, and she is practically drunk on the stuff.

For a guy who’s spent most of his life in a subtropical place, autumn can be a pretty magical time. The season is truly an exercise of subtlety here in Lake Worth. But I’ve spent quite a few autumns in New York as a boy, where I remember making leaf books each year. In the first grade, Mrs. Cava had us gather leaves we liked and we placed them in wax paper bags and ironed them to construction paper and bound them into books. I miss falling leaves and I miss wax paper bags. Both smell so good. I also lived in Alabama for a few autumns, where stray cotton would blow from the fields to litter the roadsides. And there were a couple of blissful autumns in Maine, in Seth’s hometown, where we would load up on heirloom pumpkins and drink more cider than water and it’s a wonder I never drove off the road on my to Portland as I passed stands of swamp maples that mesmerized me with their vibrant hues. And Seth and I met in autumn in North Carolina, at the Penland School of Crafts, where he was a potter and I, naturally, printed a book called Autumn. I may live in a decidedly unautumnal place, but autumn is the season I love most.

The moment of equinox is different each year and this one arrives at 4:21 AM on the 23rd of September here in Lake Worth, which is Eastern Daylight Time. If precision is important to you, calculate from here to your location. This is a very black and white view, though, and I tend to see the world in shades of grey. I’m rarely interested in precision in matters such as these, but more interested in the general theme of balance that arrives with this time. The equinox will also bring the arrival of autumn by the almanac in the Northern Hemisphere (and of course spring in the Southern). But the almanac provides just one way of looking at things. More traditional reckoning of time places the equinox as the middle of autumn, and I like to picture the season, and the year, in this way: balanced right now, like a scale. Tomorrow it begins tipping more toward darkness as the Earth shifts back even further in its seat: winter is fast approaching as we enter now the darker half of the year.

Image: Haden getting as much sunlight as she can, pressed up against the glass of our front door. Come November, she’ll have more sunlight than she’ll know what do with streaming in through the same glass. Each day different than the one that came before and the one that follows.

If you’ve been walking or driving due east at sunrise in the past few days, you may have noticed the sun rising almost directly ahead of you in alignment with your eastbound road. Same for due west at sunset. We’ve been on the approach to the equinox.

Spring, by the almanac, begins this evening. It is the vernal equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere, and it comes at 6:45 pm here in Lake Worth, which is Eastern Daylight Time. It is a time of balance, with the amount of daylight and darkness in approximate balance currently in both hemispheres of the globe. For the Southern, autumn is beginning, and for us, spring.

By traditional reckoning of time, this day is a midpoint: spring began with Imbolc at the start of February, and with the solstice we are at the midpoint of spring, well on our way toward May Day and the traditional start of summer. We are also now midway between the year’s longest night (Winter Solstice, or Midwinter) and its longest day (Summer Solstice, or Midsummer). Tomorrow, day will overtake night in the Northern Hemisphere, and we will continue on this path of lengthening days until Midsummer. The constant pendulum of nature at work. And yet for now, balance.

Image: Spring by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Oil on canvas, 1573, [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

Tonight, by the almanac, autumn begins in the Northern Hemisphere. The precise moment, for those of you who like precision, is 10:29 PM here in Lake Worth. That’s Eastern Daylight Time, so you can do the math accordingly to where you live. Precision is great, but I am more of a roundabout kind of guy, and I am more of a traditionalist, anyway, of the mindset that autumn began with Lammas, the celebration of the first harvest, at the start of August. By this traditional reckoning of time, we are now midway through autumn, and we are also now midway between the year’s longest day (Summer Solstice, or Midsummer) and its longest night (Winter Solstice, or Midwinter). Tomorrow we inch closer to darkness, crossing a border that begins to make nights longer than days in our hemisphere. But for now, we are balanced, and this, hopefully, is reflected in us.

The time of gathering in intensifies now, for as darkness overtakes light, cold increases, as does our sense of urgency, and even in these times of plenty, when we can have almost anything we want at any time of year (should we wish it), still we instinctually gather in and take more joy in home and in hearth. And so now we balance what was the opening aperture of spring at the opposite side of the seasonal round with gathering, storing, closing. Winter is coming; naturally, we want to make it as warm and comfortable as we can.

Here in South Florida, whereas spring comes early, so autumn comes late. It’s still quite summery out there for us. But Orion is there lording over the early morning darkness before the sun rises to the east, and occasionally we wake up to a slightly less humid day. The air is growing lighter, less still. We begin to play with the idea of shutting off the air conditioning and throwing open the windows. But that’s Florida for you: often a little contrary to the rest of the country. Nonetheless, soon the big green leaves of the Florida Almond trees will begin turning red. They are not widely planted, and they are wall flowers for most of the year, but each autumn for a couple of weeks they make their presence known. There’s one across the street in Old Aunt Sarah’s lot. Sometimes I walk on over and stand under that blazing red tree and even though it may be 80 degrees all around me, I look up into those red leaves and pretend that I am in a place where autumn makes itself well known.

If you are in one of those places, go, gather some apples, visit a farmer who grows pumpkins (like Intervale Farm in New Gloucester, Maine… that’s all Jan Wilcox grows there), find someone who makes cinnamon doughnuts and tells good stories. Pour yourself some cider, hard or fresh, either is fine, raise your glass to Seth and me, and we will do the same from here. It just won’t be as chilly here, and the colors won’t be nearly as beautiful.

Image: Autumn by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Oil on canvas, 1573, [Public domain] via WikiMedia Commons.