Fall                                                                          Samhain Moon

As Paul Douglas say, Minnesota is full of arm-chair meteorologists.  And I’m one of them.  My Davis weather system, now in its sixth year of operation, sends me information to a display that sits over the computer.  Right now we have a 2 mph wind from the NNW; it’s 34 degrees, with 76% humidity, a dewpoint of 28% and a rising barometer at 29.94 millibars.  We had .01 inches of rain overnight and the moon, waning, is half full.

When, for a two year period, I wrote a weather column for the Star-Tribune as one of several state-wide volunteers, the weather was even more central to my day.  During the growing season, I watch it primarily for its effect on work plans.  The longer term trends like drought and the changing frost-free window that defines our productive time I follow occasionally, the latter more carefully as spring or fall approach.

Weather is an example, and a fairly straight-forward one comparatively, of the complex systems not reducible to their individual atomic parts or their physics alone.  It’s fairly straight-forward because weather is not alive, though it can act that way at times.  It is, however, dynamic in the extreme, and the famous chaos effect example of a butterfly flapping its wings is a metaphor for the often far off events that impact our local weather.

Who could have predicted at the beginning of the industrial revolution, sometime in the mid-18th century, that those churning, whirring, creaking, whooshing machines would someday alter the weather forever?  What’s starting right now that might have an equal impact?  I’d guess private space-exploration and the field of biotechnology.

With complex systems the drivers are not easily discovered and are sometimes impossible to discover, at least early on, e.g. the industrial revolution.

Fall                                                                  Samhain Moon

The mornings are darker.  The evenings, too.  The night has begun to shift its way toward noon, pushing in from the boundaries where it was held back by the angled earth. Perverse as it is, I’m glad.  The furnace is on and the house takes on that snug burrow feel common to the fallow season.  We’re all hobbits for the duration.  Bring me my second breakfast.

The weather news has frosts, light and hard, within the week.  26 on Tuesday.  Well, fine.  I put the garden away for the most part long ago.  A few apples are left on the tree, a few raspberries on the canes, the leeks.  That’s it.  Of course, there’s the broadcast fertilizer for the orchard, planting bulbs, spraying the biotill on orchard and vegetable garden, but that’s all doable.

Then, with Halloween/Samhain we begin the long holiseason where we humans light up the landscape with our fear of the sun’s forever absence.  We eat, light candles, string outdoor lights, give gifts, go to special seasonal choral and theatrical events, gather with family.  Really we’re gathering around the fire huddled up hoping this will not be the year when the sun leaves and chooses not to come back.  It always has but you never know.

Lughnasa                                                                 Harvest Moon

Once again in the strange land of incoming fall in my mind and on the calendar with 90 degrees on the thermometer.  The angle of the sun has changed; it rides lower in the sky, and the quality of light has become different.  Some leaves have begun to fall, though probably driven by drought more than seasonal shift.  It’s calendar dysphoria and I’ve felt it a lot this year.  That wonderful cool May and early June, even the apparent return of a normal winter.

It’s like starting a yawn but not being able to complete it.  The heart wants to turn to walks in golden leaves, chilly mornings, sweaters perhaps, and hot chocolate.  The body, however, demands shorts and an umbrella drink.  We’re stuck halfway through a motion, unable to release ourselves fully into autumn.