By Bill Felker

 Whence is it, that the flow’res of the field doth fade, And lieth buried long in winter’s bale? Yet, soon as spring his mantle hath displayed, It flow’reth fresh, as it should never fail? – Edmund Spenser

The Moon and Sun and Meteors

The Deer Rutting Moon, is full at 3:57 a.m. on Nov. 19, and passes through a partial eclipse beginning about 2 a.m. and ending around 4 a.m. As it wanes through the remainder of the week, the Moon reaches apogee, its benign position farthest from Earth, on Nov. 20 at 9 p.m. Rising in the evening and setting in the daytime, this Moon passes overhead in the middle of the night. Fish and game activity could be greatest at that time and at the second-best lunar period, the middle of the day. As the barometer falls in advance of the Nov. 20 and 24 cold fronts, activity should increase.

Keep watching for the Leonid meteors until the 21st in the east in Leo after 12 a.m. Leo will be located behind Orion, well up in the eastern sky.

On Nov. 22, the Sun enters its Deep Winter sign of Sagittarius.

Weather Trends

The third week of November is the second week of Late Fall, and the cold typically intensifies. Chances of weather in the 60s are still 50/50, but a high in the 70s only happens once in 20 years this time of year, and days in the 30s and 40s are becoming common. Full Moon on the 19th increases the likelihood of chilly temperatures, especially as it travels through its third quarter (after full Moon).

Zeitgebers

(Events in Nature that Tell the Time of Year)

Climbing bittersweet opens in the woods. Hardy forsythia leaves are giving way to the cold and rain. Craneflies are half grown; they become more obvious as some of the few insects out in the November weather.

The last crickets die in the cold nights. Autumn violets end their season beside the woodland paths. In warm autumns, spring’s new henbit can be budding.

Sugar maples, burned by frost, gradually drop their foliage. Almost every junco has arrived for winter. Indoors, your Christmas cactus has started to bud, maybe even flower. Decorative pear leaves fall near this date, creating a major change in the suburban landscapes, which favor these hardy ornamental trees.

Mind and Body

The S.A.D. Index, which measures seasonal stress on a scale from 1 to 100, remains in the 70s and 80s throughout the period, indicating that the length of the day, the weather, cloud cover and the power of the Moon will influence emotions more than any time so far in the autumn. Also expect increased levels of arthritis pain as the cold fronts of Nov. 20 and 24 approach the region. If you keep track of your physical ailments on a graph, comparing them with a graph of barometric highs and lows, you could find that the weather has more to do with your health than you thought.

In the Field and Garden

In the fields, most winter wheat has sprouted. Under the late autumn sky, the sugar beet harvest has ended.

Mulch the wet perennial beds to prevent drying. Around the yard, stake young shrubs and trees. Wrap young transplants to protect them against frost cracking. Clean up the last of the garden weeds.

In southern counties, tobacco stripping is well underway, and traditional tobacco markets open as November’s fourth week begins.

 Cut wood throughout the rest of the month under the waning Moon. Test and feed your garden soil.

Almanack Classics

The Worst Thing I Ever Did

From the memories of Maurine Lamb Johnson (Born 1904)

I believe the worst thing that I ever did was putting flypaper on my brother Robert’s head and mine.

In those days, people used big sheets of flypaper and put them around on tops of tables and furniture. There were no fly sprays then. When the papers were sufficiently full of buzzing flies, people burned them and put out new ones.

The wind had blown some sheets of flypaper full of flies on the kitchen floor. I thought that it would be fun to put them on our heads.

I patted one down on Robert’s head, and then put one on mine. But because of my hair ribbon, mine didn’t stick too well. When Mother came in and found us, I think she nearly fainted.

Mine came off easily, but Robert’s was an awful problem. She first tried pulling a little off at a time. It hurt him so much so she decided one big yank wouldn’t hurt worse. But it did.

I probably got a good spanking this time from my dad, as I deserved it. We always said that Mother switched us more often, but Dad did it the hardest.

Journal

The temporal countryside takes on its autumnal contours from the increasingly violent movements of the Earth’s atmosphere as it tilts away from the sun.

Graphs of barometric pressure reveal many of the topographical patterns of the season. August’s barometric configurations are slow and gentle like low, rolling dunes. Heat waves show up as wide plateaus. Thunderstorms are sharp, shallow troughs in the mellow waves of the atmospheric landscape.

At the close of Late Summer, the year has begun its ascent to the steep cliffs of December. By the end of September, the barometric waves are stronger; the high-pressure peaks become taller; the lows are deeper, with almost every valley bringing rain.

Tapering floral sequences and the gradual surge of leaf turn occur amid the diminishing prairie of Early Fall. From the broad barometric lowland of warmth with its six months of birdsong and its hundred days of insect calls, the Sun pulls the land up into the foothills of the year where asters and goldenrod bloom and where trees are gold and red.

But then Late Fall is the rough piedmont of another country, stripping foliage, putting buds into dormancy, burning away the undergrowth and revealing the dark hillsides. At the start of Early Winter, December’s great range of cold and snow fills the horizon. Beyond it lies another immense upland, the frigid, high plateau of Deep Winter in which nothing ever seems to grow or change until the ground crumbles and gives way, shattered by thaws, and time tumbles down into the sudden, stormy gorge of March.

Poor Will Wants Your Stories

Poor Will pays $5 for unusual and true farm, garden, animal and even love stories used in this almanack. Send yours to Poor Will’s Almanack at P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387 or to wlfelker@gmail.com.

ANSWERS TO LAST WEEK’S SCKRAMBLER

In order to estimate your SCKRAMBLER IQ, award yourself 15 points for each word unscrambled, adding a 50-point bonus for getting all of them correct. If you find a typo, add another 15 points to your IQ.

DURABLE    BLEAURD

RELIABLE  ABELILER

NOTICEABLE CEABLEITON

CAPABLE    AACPBLE

ACCEPTABLE TABLECCAPE

LIKEABLE            KEABLEIL

AVAILABLE        VAAILLABE

VALUABLE  VAALLUBE

IRRITABLE            IRIRATBLE

THIS WEEK’S RHYMING SCKRAMBLER

REECSS

SSCCAE

SSSCEBA

SSSPPUER

FESSNOC

NOCSSERG

MEPSSER

DDSSEAR

PIMSSER

SSERPMOCED

Bill Felker’s Poor Will’s Almanack for 2022 is now available. In addition to weather, farming and gardening information, reader stories and astronomical data, this edition contains 50 essays from Bill’s weekly radio segment on NPR radio, WYSO. For your autographed copy (by media mail), send $22 to Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, OH 45387. Or order from Amazon or from www.poorwillsalmanack.com.

Copyright 2021 – W. L. Felker