Samhain                                                                 Thanksgiving Moon

The snow came.  Wet and heavy, it presses down on tree branches, putting those with leaves under stress.  These snows can crack limbs as it did to the cedar trees we cultivated for so long just off our deck.

These early snows are not the snows of romance and greeting cards.  They clump and weigh, turn immediately into slush underfoot, leaking through footwear.  They don’t last long since the same temperatures that create them, once daylight appears, will begin to melt them.

They can drop the temperature since snow cover is one of the factors that keeps a winter cold.  It’s the albedo effect.  White snow reflects the sunlight back into space, where it warms the air, but not the ground.  That’s also why Minnesota’s tendency under previous climate regimes to keep snow cover around for the whole winter made us colder.  If the earth is bare, it soaks up some of the sun’s heat and raises air temperature near the ground.

In the months after Samhain the sun recedes, losing power.  Not only are the days shorter, but the angle of the sun spreads what sunlight we receive over a larger area, weakening its intensity.  These are not months favorable to the vegetative world.  In reading an article about Samhain in the New York Times the writer reminded me of a key element of the Samhain season, the tallying up of the amount of fodder available to feed animals.

When the number of animals exceeded the available feed, farmers culled their herds until they were sustainable.  This meant that there was often meat at Samhain, but the slaughter added another death related aspect to the holiday.

Samhain                                                                    Thanksgiving Moon

Snow has begun to fall, pelting down in thick wet clumps.  It could be that we’ll get enough to plow.  Maybe.  We have a snow plower contracted and he’ll be here tomorrow if we need him.   Our Simplicity snow blower worked very well for us over the 16 plus years we had it, but I grew weary of getting up early to blow the snow and fuss with the inevitable mechanical difficulties.  When our Tundra collapsed, we no longer had a straightforward way of moving it.

Now the snow can come and Jeremy will remove what we need removed.  The deck off our kitchen needs shoveling, too, but I do that.  I like being able to enjoy the snow.  There’s something soothing and quintessentially northern about snow.  It represents the southward sweep of polar conditions, a reminder that once again, even though we warm the globe now, that ice and snow will cover most of this state again as it has in the geologic past.

These first snows also serve as heralds of the winter holidays, reminding us of hot chocolate, cookies and roaring fires.

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.