AncienTrails

Hello November

Samhain                                                  Full Dark Moon

“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”
-   Emily Dickinson

As if to say sorry about October, November has dawned full of light.  An October in the top ten for cold and wet (and gloom) has passed onto the lower part of the spiral, but we will return to this spot next year.  When I look outside my window, I see the golden leaves of dogwoods not yet fallen, a few poison ivy plants I’ve not killed and the green of the pachysandra all backlit by the morning sun.

On October 20th we had lost 34 degrees of inclination for the sun since the Summer Solstice and by November 20th we will have lost 44, close to the December 20th number of 47.   Our planet’s tilt moves our hemisphere away from the sun as we move through this sector of our orbit around Sol.  The resulting decrease in the intensity of sunlight brings us winter in spite of perihelion (our closest physical approach to the sun) which occurs on January 3rd.

According to my weather station we got 4.4 inches of rain here in Andover, though the weather bureau counted over 5.  We had a mean maximum temperature of  47.7 and mean minimum of 34.7 for a mean temperature of 41.4.  The high for the month of 60.2 degrees came on October 18th and the low of 20.8 on the 13th.  Perhaps most surprising we had 11 days with below freezing temperatures.

We saved an hour this morning, the day is sunny and the outside beckons for the first time in a long time.  Later.