The surge of summer’s beauty; dell and crag,
Hollow and lake, hillside and pine arcade,
Are touched with genius.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Musketaquid”
In the Sky
The Milky Way fills the western horizon as Orion sets just behind the sun. Now the middle of the heavens are in their prime spring planting position, Castor and Pollux to the west, Leo with its bright Regulus directly overhead, and Arcturus dominating the east. At midnight, the brightest star overhead is Arcturus, the brightest western star is Regulus, and the brightest light in the east is Vega.
By April 16, the sun reaches a declination of 10 degrees four minutes: that’s about 70 percent of the way to summer solstice. April 21 marks halfway between equinox and solstice.
The Moons of May
May 1: The Tadpole Moon enters its final quarter.
May 7: The Honeybee Swarming Moon is new.
May 15: The moon enters its second quarter.
May 23: The moon is full.
May 30: The moon enters its final quarter.
Weather Trends
High temperatures are usually above 60 degrees the week ahead, with the chances of 70′s or better rising to 70 percent, a 10 percent increase over last week’s chances. A high in the 50′s occurs rarely, but if it does appear, it is typically on the 21st and 24th.
Chances of frost are usually low, but tender plants are in some danger after the passage of May’s fourth cold front on the 15th and fifth cold front on the 20th, and especially around Full Moon, May 23, the Last-Frost Moon of the first half of the year, which occasionally nips tomatoes and bedding plants throughout the Lower Midwest.
The Natural Calendar
All the clovers come into bloom, along with the small black medic, purple vetch, and the weedy yellow and white sweet clover, in all but the northernmost states. When the clovers bloom, flea season begins for dogs, cats, goats, cattle, horses and sheep.
Ragweed has grown two feet tall, crickets sing, and cow vetch, wild parsnips, poison hemlock, angelica, motherwort, wild roses, locusts, blackberries and yarrow flower. The last of the leaves come out for summer. In the salt marshes of the South, fiddler crabs emerge from their tunnels in the creeks and estuaries.
Then when azaleas lose their petals, daisies and the first clematis and the first cinquefoil open all the way, the first strawberry ripens, and the first swallowtail butterflies visit the star of Bethlehem and bleeding hearts. The last quince flowers fall, and lilacs decay.
Multiflora roses and wild raspberries are budding. Black walnuts and oaks become the major sources of pollen. Deep red ginger has replaced the toad trillium close to the ground, around the fingers of white sedum. Cedar waxwings migrate up the rivers as the last buckeye flowers fall. Half the goslings are bigger than galoshes.
Countdown to Summer
- One week until the first orange daylilies blossom
- Two weeks until roses flower
- Three weeks until the first mulberries are sweet for picking and cottonwood cotton drifts in the wind
- Four weeks until wild black raspberries ripen
- Five weeks until fledgling robins peep in the bushes and fireflies mate in the night
- Six weeks until cicadas chant in the hot and humid days
- Seven weeks until thistles turn to down
- Eight weeks until sycamore bark starts to fall, marking the center of Deep Summer
- Nine weeks to the season of singing crickets and katydids after dark
- Ten weeks until ragweed pollen floats in the wind
In the Field and Garden
In the garden, remove seedpods from daffodils and tulips. The first zucchini ripens and elderberries start to bloom. When the first firefly glows in the lawn, flea beetles come feeding in the vegetable garden.
Consider adding to your lily collection now or transplanting groups of lilies that have become too thick.
In an average spring, strawberry growers have been harvesting their berries all week.
Just as all the corn gets planted, the armyworms and corn borers go to work. They appear in fields throughout the country this month.
Haying ordinarily has started throughout the southern counties of the region.
The major commercial planting time for cantaloupes and cucumbers has begun. Most of the commercial potatoes and processing tomatoes have been planted by this date – and all tomatoes for home use should be in the ground, as well.
Journal
An ambiguous space between seasons sometimes allows me to break with my lineal mind. I lose expectations and even the tension of hope. I make a suspension of belief like I do when everything is beyond my control.
The fact that the advance of external spring this year is outside of my power gives me an excuse to imagine that I do not have influence in matters of internal spring. Allowing myself to be caught at the crossroads of inter-seasonal ambivalence, I give up my autonomy for a neutral sanctuary.
My anticipation about the advent of May and regret at the end of my winter hibernation clash like the frontal dichotomies of early spring weather, and the resultant standoff of my February, March and April procrastination spins me into a temporal and spatial slough, an aimless, spinning eye of the storm. Or it is as if the end of the some road were still a long way off, as though I were safely between the present and my destination, as though I had no need to hurry, no need to follow any map, as though there still were plenty of time, as though the moment of truth had been delayed indefinitely.
My clear January orientation has been shunted away by the split personality of the current landscape. The markers and signals of the time are mixed, pointing one way and then another. The sun is so high at noon, and the evenings are so long. Cardinals and robins sing before dawn. But the air is often so cold. Caught in the gateway between the last of the daffodils and fresh strawberries, I cease to care which way I am going or how distant home remains, or even if there is a home. I take on the ambivalence of nature, riding that excuse at a peak of freedom in which the past hides and the future is unimagined, in which I, for this moment, live suspended above anticipation and commitment.
Bill Felker lives with his wife in Yellow Springs. His “Poor Will’s Almanack” airs on his weekly NPR radio segment on WYSO-FM (91.3).
About the Author