Book of Days

10:21 AM today in Lake Worth: here begins autumn by the almanac. This is Eastern Daylight Time, so if you are seeking the precise equinox moment in your town, work from that basis. We enter again a time of balance.

Of course our planet’s shifting to and fro is a subtle thing. Massive as it is, it travels its course, tilting one way then the other, over and over again, creating our seasonal shifts. And this is an amazing thing to ponder, this delicate balancing act. The balance is something we’ve been approaching for quite a while now, and for days lately, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that the sun is rising pretty much due east and setting pretty much due west. But as our planet tilts further yet, the sun will appear to drift further south. Our days have been growing shorter bit by bit ever since the Midsummer solstice in June and here, today, with the equinox, we reach that complete balance: day and night are essentially equal, across the globe.

But the Earth keeps shifting and tomorrow our Northern Hemisphere day will be slightly briefer than our night, and in the Southern Hemisphere, the opposite is true: They are approaching summer, we are approaching winter. This sounds very concrete and it is, in its way… but these are not so much logical conclusions as they are points along the wheel of the year. Nothing is black and white in this scheme. Everything is in flux, a change almost imperceptible… but certain. Our days here in the North will continue to grow shorter and our nights longer until the Earth shifts again to the opposite direction in its tilting. That won’t happen until the Midwinter solstice in December.

For our ancestors, this celestial equinox event was the midpoint of autumn, a season that began for them with Lammas in early August. I love viewing the world in this fashion and through this more traditional reckoning of time. There is, to me, a bit more logic in it. But then again, I live in Florida. Nothing makes sense here, especially our seasons. For weeks now I’ve been driving by farms watching tractors prepare the ground for planting, and now that the equinox is here, certainly it is time to plant the tomatoes and peppers and sweet corn. Welcome to my world. It is, I’m afraid, a bit topsy-turvy.

As in the great clockworks of the celestial sphere, so in us. Our great planet achieves balance today. We would do well at this time of balance to seek balance, too.

Image: “Holzsammlerin im Herbstwald” by Friedrich Kallmorgen. Oil on canvas, 1893 [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons. I love that the wood gatherer in this picture is enveloped in golden orange hues. This does not happen to us here in Florida and it is almost incomprehensible to me that this is what trees look like beneath the chlorophyl. I also can barely believe the lakes freeze over in winter. Obviously, I need to leave Florida more often.

Our great big Earth constantly is shifting in its seat and tonight in the Northern Hemisphere, in the overnight hours betwixt Tuesday and Wednesday, we will reach a time of balance: It is the autumnal equinox. Ever since the Midsummer solstice in June we’ve been losing a bit of daylight with each passing day, and now, halfway between Midsummer and Midwinter, things are balanced. But only briefly, for almost as soon as the balance is reached, the planet’s shifting continues and darkness now begins to overtake light.

We see this constant rearrange in ways both obvious and subtle. The obvious thing we notice is that the sun rises much later and sets much earlier now than it did at Midsummer. The subtle things are more fleeting in nature: when I drive due east toward home after work the sun is setting and shining now right in my eyes through my rear view mirrors. At home, Haden the Convivio Shopcat is spending more time pressed up against the south windows as the sun dips lower in the sky; the sunlight streams again into those windows, and she is practically drunk on the stuff.

For a guy who’s spent most of his life in a subtropical place, autumn can be a pretty magical time. The season is truly an exercise of subtlety here in Lake Worth. But I’ve spent quite a few autumns in New York as a boy, where I remember making leaf books each year. In the first grade, Mrs. Cava had us gather leaves we liked and we placed them in wax paper bags and ironed them to construction paper and bound them into books. I miss falling leaves and I miss wax paper bags. Both smell so good. I also lived in Alabama for a few autumns, where stray cotton would blow from the fields to litter the roadsides. And there were a couple of blissful autumns in Maine, in Seth’s hometown, where we would load up on heirloom pumpkins and drink more cider than water and it’s a wonder I never drove off the road on my to Portland as I passed stands of swamp maples that mesmerized me with their vibrant hues. And Seth and I met in autumn in North Carolina, at the Penland School of Crafts, where he was a potter and I, naturally, printed a book called Autumn. I may live in a decidedly unautumnal place, but autumn is the season I love most.

The moment of equinox is different each year and this one arrives at 4:21 AM on the 23rd of September here in Lake Worth, which is Eastern Daylight Time. If precision is important to you, calculate from here to your location. This is a very black and white view, though, and I tend to see the world in shades of grey. I’m rarely interested in precision in matters such as these, but more interested in the general theme of balance that arrives with this time. The equinox will also bring the arrival of autumn by the almanac in the Northern Hemisphere (and of course spring in the Southern). But the almanac provides just one way of looking at things. More traditional reckoning of time places the equinox as the middle of autumn, and I like to picture the season, and the year, in this way: balanced right now, like a scale. Tomorrow it begins tipping more toward darkness as the Earth shifts back even further in its seat: winter is fast approaching as we enter now the darker half of the year.

Image: Haden getting as much sunlight as she can, pressed up against the glass of our front door. Come November, she’ll have more sunlight than she’ll know what do with streaming in through the same glass. Each day different than the one that came before and the one that follows.