By Bill Felker

A day when the white fires of March are sweeping over the wide landscape…Willows gleam with brilliant yellow…The wind blows endlessly….Spiders scattering in dry grass….Crows flying over wide valleys….I drink out of a maple sap bucket…if only a man could drink of it and thereby become one with this quickening fire of March…. – Charles Burchfield, Journal

The Moon and the Sun

The Fourth Week of Early Spring

The Black-Capped Chickadee Moon, full on March 18 at 2:18 a.m., wanes throughout the remainder of the month, reaching perigee, its position closest to Earth, on the 23rd and entering its last quarter at 7 a.m. on March 25. Rising in the evening and setting in the morning, this moon passes overhead in the middle of the night, encouraging creatures to be more active around that time, especially as the cold fronts of March 19 and 24 approach.

Even though the day lengthens at different rates at different locations, equinox is still equinox at exactly 5:29 a.m. March 20 in the whole country. The Sun enters the Middle Spring sign of Aries at the same time.

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

Weather Trends

The cold front that arrives within a day or two of equinox marks the end of the worst of the weather systems of the first half of the year. Expect precipitation and frost with this high, and the greatest likelihood for thunder and lightning since the end of last summer. After the front passes through, look for sun and more frost, then a decided warm-up several days after lunar perigee. Although the “first day of spring” is often chilly, it is frequently partly to mostly sunny.

Zeitgebers

Events in Nature that Tell the Time of Year

When you hear turkeys gobbling in the woods, then toad trillium will be pushing up through the mulch. And when goldfinches turn summer gold, then early spring is ending, and middle spring will arrive within a week.

When white-flowered magnolias bloom, then snow trillium will be blossoming in the bottomlands, and sandhill cranes will be migrating north in the Rocky Mountains. When scillas color the lawns blue, then raspberry leaves will be ready for tea, and touch-me-nots will have sprouted in the swamps.

When you see early spring’s first butterflies – the question marks and the tortoise shells and the cabbage moths – then catfish are getting ready to feed. When pollen forms on all the pussy willows, then yellow-bellied sapsuckers are mating and violet cress is opening along the rivers.

In the Field and Garden

As the moon wanes, livestock owners begin spring worming their animals to reduce parasite egg counts. And the waning moon of March is ideal for starting all root crops directly in the garden or in flats, if the weather is cold.

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 any 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.

Mind and Body

The horoscope of nature brings good news this week. The moon is waning, and birdsong is increasing before dawn, and the odds for sun and for milder weather increase by the day. At the same time, color is increasing in pastures and lawns, and more bulbs and early wildflowers are coming into flower. Influenced by all these factors, physical and psychological problems temporarily lighten, allowing for some of the first benign episodes of spring fever. The S.A.D. Index (which measures forces associated with Seasonal Affective Disorder on a scale from 1 to 100), after surging because of full moon and lunar perigee, falls to a spring-like 38 by March 28.

Almanack Classics

Telephones

By Becky Corwin-Adams, Englewood, Ohio

It amazes me how many people these days cannot drive, shop or even walk down the street without chatting on a cell phone. I really don’t like going to the airport anymore because of the constant noise of cell phone conversations. It is impossible to read or relax while waiting for your flight.

I knew one person who had a cell phone in the early 1980s. They were called

“car phones” back then. Now I am hard pressed to name five people I know who

do NOT have a cell phone. Even our 11-year-old granddaughter has her own

cell phone. It is difficult to find a car driver who is not talking on their cell phone these days!

When I was growing up in Defiance, Ohio, in the 1960s, we had a four party

phone line. People under the age of 30 have no idea party lines ever existed! Our first phone number was five digits. Most phones were black in those days. We still had an old rotary dial phone in our home until about three years ago. Our granddaughter did not know how to use it, even after being shown how to dial.

When our oldest son was a teenager, we did not yet have a cordless phone. We

had to buy the longest cord available so he could take the phone to his bedroom to have private conversations with his girlfriend. That made it difficult to walk down the hallway. The phone cord eventually wore the paint off the wall. The cord itself became very long from constantly being stretched out.

My grandmother was from down south. She grew up in Tennessee. Those southerners had what Grandma called “tokens.” Grandma still had her old antique wooden crank telephone hanging in the kitchen. Every time someone got hurt or was going to die, her old telephone would ring. The first time it rang was before her youngest son got sick and died. The second time it rang was before her oldest son died. It also rang before one of her grandsons was in an automobile accident. When it rang that time, Grandma said to herself that something was going to happen to Jeff. She later chided herself for not warning him. That old phone also rang before Grandma fell and broke her hip in 1993. That was the last time it rang. My Aunt Millie now has the phone. No one else in the family was brave enough to take it.

***

Poor Will’s Almanack pays $5 for stories used in this column. Send your stories to Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387.

Poor Will’s Almanack for 2022 is still available, containing the S.A.D. Index, as well as natural history essays for each week of the year, monthly weather reports, some of the best reader stories of all time, and a monthly farm and garden calendar. Purchase your copy from Amazon or, for an autographed Almanack, order from www.poorwillsalmanack.com. Or send $22 to Poor Will, P.O. Box 431, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387.

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.

MUBP BUMP

LUCPM CLUMP

UDMP DUMP

PUMH HUMP

JPMU           JUMP

LUPM LUMP

MUPM MUMP

LUPPM PLUMP

RUTMP TRUMP

PULSM SLUMP

THIS WEEK’S RHYMING SCKRAMBLER

COKL

CKOLC

KOCMS

OLKCF

KCOH

COSK

CKLBO

OPKC

CKOR

NOCKK

Copyright 2022 – W. L. Felker