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.