The format of all my notes in this daybook owes more than a little to the almanacs I wrote and continue to write for the Yellow Springs News between 1984 and 2017. The quotations, daily statistics, the weather outlooks, the seasonal calendar and the daybook journal were and still are part of my regular routine of collecting and organizing impressions about the place in which I live. Setting: The principal habitat described here is that of Glen Helen, a preserve of woods and glades that forms the eastern border of the village of Yellow Springs in southwestern Ohio. Quotations: The passages from ancient and modern writers (and sometimes from my alter egos) which accompany each day’s notations are lessons from my readings, as well as from distant seminary and university training, here put to work in service of the reconstruction of my sense of time and space. They are a collection of reminders, hopes, and promises for me that I find implicit in the seasons. They have also become a kind of a cosmological scrapbook for me, as well as the philosophical underpinning of this narrative. Astronomical Data: I have included the sunrise and sunset for Yellow Springs as a general guide to the progression of the year in this location, but those statistics also reflect trends that are world wide. Average Temperatures: Average temperatures in Yellow Springs are also part of each day’s entry. Since the rise and fall of temperatures in other parts of the North America keep pace with the temperatures in Yellow Springs, the daybook’s highs and lows, like solar statistics, are helpful indicators of the steady progress of the year everywhere. Weather: My daily, weekly and monthly weather summaries have been distilled from over thirty years of observations, and they offer a statistical description of each day. Although information about the Yellow Springs microclimate at first seemed too narrow to be of use to those who lived outside my area, I began to adjust my data to meet the needs of a number of regional and national farm publications for which I started writing in the mid 1980s. And so, while the weather summaries are based on my records in southwestern Ohio, they can be and have been used, with interpretation and interpolation, throughout the Lower Midwest, the Middle Atlantic states and the East. The Natural Calendar: This seasonal summary includes approximate dates for astronomical events such as star movement, meteor showers, solstice, equinox, perihelion (the sun’s position closest to Earth) and aphelion (the sun’s position farthest from Earth). In this section I note changes in foliage and floral, farm and garden practices, migration times for common birds and peak periods of insect activity. At the beginning of each spring and summer month, I have included a wildflower calendar that lists blooming dates for hundreds of wildflowers in an average Yellow Springs season. Although the flora of the eastern and central United States is hardly limited to the species mentioned here, the flowers listed are common enough to provide easily recognized landmarks for gauging the advance of the year in most areas east of the Mississippi. Daybook: The daybook journal consists of my notes on what I saw happening in nature around me in Yellow Springs between 1979 and 2017. It is a collection of observations made from the window of my car and from my walks in Glen Helen, in other parks and wildlife areas within a few miles of my home, and on occasional trips in the United States and abroad. The cumulative format of the daybook, which brings together all of the annual entries for the same day through the span of over thirty years, has shown me the regularity of the seasons, and it fleshes out a broad, multi faceted picture of each segment of the year. At the same time, this format provides an informal base line for monitoring future changes in local climate.
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