EPHEMERIS FOR THE FIFTH WEEK OF LATE SUMMER
The Monarch Butterfly Moon waxes all week, entering its second quarter on September 7 at 9:04 a.m. Rising in the afternoon and setting in the evening, this moon will be overhead in the late afternoon and early evening.
Venus is in Virgo with Mars this month, barely visible along the eastern horizon before sunrise. Saturn precedes the dawn in Leo, and Jupiter lies in the western evening sky with Sagittarius, setting by the middle of the night.
TAKING STOCK
At the end of August, I took inventory of what was happening around the yard and in the alley. When I compared my notes with the observations from the same day in previous years, I found that little had changed one year to the next.
My seasonal inventories are like that. They often recreate the past; sometimes they also heighten my awareness of the present and give me a feel for the future. The repetitions of events reinforce a sense of grounding. They bring few surprises or disappointments.
This year, someone asked me if I could give an excuse for my listings, some practical application for writing down the same phenomena August after August. I made up a response on the spur of the moment about the metaphoric quality of all nature, but later I thought about Einstein’s statement about insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And so then I asked myself: What is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same results - even being excited at the same results?
Fifty years ago, I was always hungry for new sensations. I did everything I could just to do it, just because it was different from what I had done before. These days, I find novelty in repetition. I am glad to find the same plant in the same place blooming at the same time year after year. I am glad to hear the cicadas and the katydids summer after summer.
If each year is generally like the previous year, next year may well be the same as this year. But I am never completely sure, and so I live in a low-grade state of cosmological suspense. There is much at stake, it seems to me, in tracking the recurrence of the most common events; maybe even sanity is at stake.
And there is always compensation enough in doing the experiment one more day. Each time, I am reassured and reaffirmed by the results: I can know at least a portion of the future. It is a place I have visited before. It is familiar ground. It is home.
EPHEMERIS FOR THE FIRST WEEK OF EARLY FALL
The Monarch Butterfly Moon becomes completely full at 4:13 a.m. next Monday, the 15th. Rising in the early evening and setting in the morning, the round moon is overhead in the middle of the night.
The Milky Way moves across the center of the sky at bedtime, the Big Dipper points to Polaris from the northern horizon. Summer's Sagittarius has moved to the far southwest. Capricorn has taken its place due south, followed by lanky Aquarius.
This is the last week of the year during which normal averages in the northern half of the nation drop only two degrees in seven days. Next week, the rate will increase to three degrees per week.
DAPPLES OF THE MONARCH BUTTERFLY MOON
In transition from summer to fall, the landscape crosses lines of color, form and history. Some visual anchors are clear: the tall goldenrod, the strong white boneset, the purple New England asters, the chicory, the new beggarticks, the bright yellow perennial helianthus that line the roadsides around Yellow Springs. In the woods, the zigzag goldenrod and white snakeroot complement the small-flowered white and violet asters. Roses, late hostas, virgin’s bower, Jerusalem artichokes and hardy annuals hide the loss of lilies and coneflowers in the garden.
These last constants of the year are set against the changing fields of grain that surround the village, patchwork yellowing soybeans and drying cornstalks, empty wheat fields. The forest canopy reveals its vulnerability, ashes and box elders browning early, black walnut trees shedding, red maples paling.
The zeitgebers for this particular time of year appear most clearly under the full Monarch Butterfly Moon, in the dapples of light and half light that easily mix the new and old and lay out the panoply of this place, what is happening and what its meaning might be. In my notebook, I stand between the patches of white and dark, between my garden and the High-Stafford alley and the fields outside of town.
Beside me, the ironweed seeds are soft and gray. A few silver olive bushes are starting to turn, wingstem shutting down, monkey flower still full, delicate jumpseeds continuing to jump, Shasta daisy and veronica still flowering, and dusky, achillea, butterfly bush, and Russian sage. Jewelweed shines, stretches to the far wood line. Joe Pye plants are gray like beards. Cut-over sneezeweed, crown vetch and catchweed have come back again to glitter in the breeze, and large-flowered swamp bidens edge the black pond with light. Across the street, a cluster of autumn crocus has emerged, shadows falling on the lawn.
In the sun, all these different pieces of the season can be too stark, so linear that they point to winter. But under the moon, everything comes together and makes sense, the stippled coat of a single creature.
