As if to yield ends one’s life?

As if one is forever encased,

ice settled upon one’s branches,

a rigid coating sealing all pores,

blocking all doors.

Are the trees afraid when spring startles?

They can’t imagine leafing,

sunk in the comfort winter finally granted,

frost-clothed.

One has to fool them forward

Lure by light filtered oddly

and disguised in cold winds,

But then, don’t even the trees

surrender? – Barbara Valdez

Equinox occurs at 10:45 a.m. March 20.  With equinox, the chances of highs in the 20s fall below 5 percent for the first time since the middle of December. Today is typically the wettest day of the week, with a 60 percent chance of precipitation and the most thunderstorms since autumn. The 21st is the driest, with just a 25 percent chance. The 21st also brings the most sun of any day in the third week of March: 70 percent of those days are clear to partly cloudy.

The Stars in March’s Third Quarter

By the middle of the month, all of winter’s stars are clustered together now in the far west just a few hours after dark. They take the Milky Way with them and completely disappear by 3 a.m. By that time, however, the summer band of the Milky Way appears in the northeastern sky, along with Cygnus, the Northern Cross and Aquila. To see both the winter and summer sides of the Milky Way, you need to be out at midnight; then look along the horizon starting in the east, then turning to the north, then all the way due west 

If you scan the horizon an hour or so before sunrise, you will see the wandering stars of Capricorn in the southeast. In the south, find Sagittarius, and then Scorpius (easily identified by the red star, Antares, in its center). West of Scorpius is the boxy Libra. West of Libra is Virgo, marked by Spica, the brightest of the western stars.

Natural Calendar

When the mourning cloaks, the question marks, the tortoise shells and the white cabbage butterflies come out, catfish are getting ready to feed in the Little and Great Miami Rivers, and goldfinches are turning gold throughout the Valley. The great predawn chorus of birds begins near 6 a.m. Later in the day, flickers and pileated woodpeckers call. Winged ants will be flying then, and the first green-bottle flies. Garter snakes will lie out sunning.

When butterflies appear, spring picks up speed, the number of new plants increasing every day even though the air is cool. Hepatica, harbinger of spring, and twinleaf are pushing out. Toad trillium and Dutchman’s britches are ready to open. The foliage of wild geranium, clover and columbine is growing. September’s zigzag goldenrod is two inches long. Leaves of the golden Alexander are an inch across. Scarlet cup mushrooms swell in the dark.

All the leaves and fungi and butterflies in the Ohio Valley are signs that sandhill cranes are migrating through the Rocky Mountains. The road to Savannah is green with leaves a third to half emerged. Wisteria is fragrant along the Georgia coast, and fields of rice show off their purple blossoms. In Alabama, it’s time for redbud trees and pears to bloom. On the outskirts of New Orleans, winter cress is going to seed, and huge, squat yellow thistles grow beside the roads; in the French Quarter, azaleas and camellias are wide open, and yellow day lilies and the crepe myrtles are flowering.

In the Field and Garden

Start a journal listing the bloom dates for the spring bulbs in your garden or that you see flowering in the neighborhood. That way, you can tell the future flowering dates (more or less).

Frost-seed the pastures where the ground is still freezing and thawing on a regular basis. If you have fruit trees, complete your spraying with dormant oil before temperatures get warmer and buds break dormancy. Mites, scale, and aphid eggs will mature quickly when the temperatures climb above 60 degrees. The insects will be more easily controlled by dormant oil spray the closer they are to hatching.

Countdown to Spring

• One week until the blooming Middle Spring wildflowers in the woods

• Three weeks until American toads sing their mating songs in the night

• Four weeks until the Great Dandelion and Violet Bloom begins

• Five weeks until azaleas and snowball viburnums and dogwoods blossom

• Six weeks until iris and poppies and daisies come into flower

• Seven weeks until the beginning of clover bloom in yards and pastures

• Eight weeks until the first orange day lily flowers

• Nine weeks until roses bloom and thistles bud

• 10 weeks until the high tree canopy begins to shade the garden

Almanack Literature

The Precious Knife

By Lois Kilgore, Plymouth, Ohio

This is a true story about my nephew, James, when he was about 8 or 9 years old.

My sister, Ruth, and her family of seven children (of which James was the second kid) lived in Knott County, Ky.

I went down to visit them for a week. They had an outhouse in the back.

We were sitting and talking in the kitchen, snapping green beans for supper.

Then we heard one of the children screaming, “Help me, please! Help me, please!”

We ran outside to see what was happening. Well, we tracked the sound to the outhouse and found James down in it. He’d fallen in and couldn’t get back out.

We got him out and asked, “What in the world were you doing down there?”

He said that he dropped his knife that his grandpa had given to him, and that no one was ever going to get that knife, not even the outhouse.

We laughed until we couldn’t laugh any more.

I think about that every time I think of him. He got killed in 1992, and we put his knife with him.

***

Follow the month of April in Bill Felker’s Daybook for the Year, available from Amazon.