The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,

Drops in a silent autumn night.

All its allotted length of days,

The flower ripens in its place,

Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,

Fast rooted in the fruitful soil. – Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Moon September

The Plum Pie Moon is new on Sept. 21.

The moon enters its second quarter on Sept. 29.

Autumn Equinox is Sept. 22.

The Major Planets of September

Look for Jupiter high in Gemini before dawn. Saturn comes up in the middle of the night and remains in the sky throughout the day. Red Mars in Virgo and giant Venus in Leo will be the Evening Stars.

The Sun

The sun moves toward fall at a little more than one degree every three days until it reaches equinox at 3:44 p.m. (EST) on Sept. 22, entering the sign of Libra at the same moment.

The Weather in the Week Ahead

Equinox parallels a drop in extremes as well as in averages. Days in the 90s are rare after the 22nd of September, and even 80s will be gone in about three weeks. The odds for an afternoon in the 50s or 60s this week doubles over those odds last week. The season of light frosts deepens in Ohio, Indiana and southern Michigan; the 24th and the 27th even carry a 20 percent chance of a mild freeze – the greatest chance since May 10. On the 23rd and the 26th, chances of a high below 70 degrees are better than 50 percent, the first time that has happened since May 4. Precipitation is usually lightest on the 28th (just a 15 percent chance of showers on that date).

When-Then Phenology

When the autumn leafturn has begun along the 40th Parallel, the deciduous trees are bare in northern Canada. In New England and in the Rocky Mountains, foliage colors are approaching their best.

When the huge pink mallows of the wetlands have died back, then the juniper tip midge appears on junipers, and gall adelgids attack the spruce threes.

When milkweed pods open, then late hosta bloom ends in town. In the woods, Middle Spring’s sedum is growing stronger. Henbit, mint and catchweed revive as the canopy thins. Waterleaf has fresh shoots. Snow-on-the-mountain has recovered from its mid-summer slump and can be as thick and as beautiful as in Early Spring.

Stilling the Kinematoscope

Keeping notes about events in nature over a number of years has shown me what I already knew: if something happens once, it will usually happen again.

When I see a particular insect or flower for the first time in the year, I check my daybook to find when I saw it in other years. Sometimes things are early, sometimes late, but they are almost always in the right sequence, the variations dependent on the quality of the season.

Often, however, I assume too much and go too far. When I see the same things happening every May, I develop expectations, and when those expectations are fulfilled, I take the expectations a little further, and then a little further still. I pretend to find rules and systems.

Finally, I start imagining that not only is each day’s journal a record of its own events, but a history of what has always occurred and what will occur again and again. I no longer wait for repetition to formulate patterns or predictions. One day’s narrative becomes enough to defuse the need for replication.

Instead of the effect sought so diligently in the 19th century by the creator of the kinematoscope, in which still pictures were rotated or manipulated to create the illusion of motion, I find a reverse effect in multiple images and in repetition, an inverse kinematoscope that stills the disruption of passage.

Once I reach that point, everything makes sense. I settle into the solid landscape of here and now. One event reaches back and forth through multiple seasons, is knit tightly with parallel events that are separated only by time, time that, in spite of appearance, and no matter how fast it seems to fly, makes the present only more fixed and indelible. Nothing is separate. One event is all there is.

A Smart Dog

By Bill Rolke, Columbus, Ind.

“We used to have a dog which was so smart,” wrote Bill, “that it could and would answer questions.

“This dog ran around a lot at night, and in the morning, if we had time to do a little hunting, we’d just call him over and ask him if he had been in the woods last night.

“He’d then either nod his head ‘yes,’ or shake it for ‘no.’ He always answered ‘yes’ to that question. Then we’d ask, ‘Did you see any squirrels?’ and he’d either nod or shake his head. If the answer was ‘yes,’ we would take him with us back into the woods and never failed to get two or three squirrels.

“We got rid of that dog, though. We discovered there were always squirrels in the woods. But that dern dog would shake his head ‘no’ when he had really been over at the neighbor’s place the night before and was just too tired to go hunting.”