Poor Will's Almanack
167 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 24 ratingsBill Felker's almanack for Southwest Ohio and beyond features observations and reflections on the natural world.
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Episodes
Poor Will's Almanack: October 8 - 14, 2019
October 08, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 210 BytesOne summer a few years ago, I spent so much time sitting on the back patio just looking out into the garden. Every few days the blossoms of the shrubs and flowers changed. I filled the bird feeders every morning, and the birds rewarded my care with their presence. Lounging on the patio, I saw more butterflies than I ever had before, watched more bees than I had ever watched before – hover bees, carpenter bees, bumblebees, bee flies, and even a few honeybees. I loved it. “I’m at the beach,” I ...
Poor Will's Almanack: October 1 - 7, 2019
October 01, 2019 10:44 - 2 minutes - 179 BytesYesterday, I went walking, found seed heads everywhere, dry rose petals, red rose hips I should have pruned, withered hydrangea blossoms covered in spiderwebs, Joe Pye weed bushy and brown like the burdock beside it, three blue spiderwort flowers blossoming out of season, hops heavy across the euonymous, oodles of black redbud seeds like manes in the branches, the soft green seeds of the fierce wood nettle, new waterleaf leaves, mottled grape vines, red crab apples bigger than I'd ever notice...
Poor Will's Almanack: September 24 - 30, 2019
September 24, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 209 BytesThis past weekend, I drove south through the full range of early fall, its different subseasons depending on the progress of the soybeans or corn or goldenrod or tobacco, depending on whether harvest complete or pending, depending on which trees were turning and how far. Sometimes, the specific time of year hinged on the number of fragile cottonwoods along the roadsides, or the advance of the violet Virginia creeper, or the number of fading box elders, catalpas, tulip trees, sycamores, crab a...
Poor Will's Almanack: September 17 - 23, 2019
September 17, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 210 BytesThe time of early fall is an ambivalent time, a time of being on the edge. Summer is not really gone, but foliage is aging quickly and flowers are disappearing. The days may be warm and humid, but the sun is a March sun and could rise to frost on any morning. I experience a vague excitement now, am in suspense as to just when the wind will change, look forward to the cold, feel relief at the end of the Dog Days, but I also wish that the season did not have to change so quickly. And I enjoy ly...
Poor Will's Almanack: September 10 - 16, 2019
September 10, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 188 BytesMy Sunday morning is quiet and lazy. Clear sky, the air soft and mild. An occasional breeze follows the butterflies: a giant swallowtail, two monarchs, three yellow tiger swallowtails, four cabbage whites. The butterfly effect seems to move the floppy leaves of the castor beans and push the drifts of zinnias and cannas. The sidle of the flowers and foliage soothes me, and I allow my ultimate concerns to settle into the deep time of wings and blossoms. Sparrows gather on the ground around the ...
Poor Will's Almanack: September 3 - 9, 2019
September 03, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 209 BytesThe change of season always changes me. Weather and landscape, seem to be the obvious parts of that transformation. I read a little about how other people react. Robert Kull, author of Solitude: Seeking wisdom in extremes, spent a year alone in the wilds of Patagonia. He wrote: “There is physical weather – sun, rain, wind – which just is, and my emotional response – pleasure, peace, anger, anxiety – that I associate with the weather. If I can tease these aspects apart and experience weather a...
Poor Will's Almanack: August 27 - September 2, 2019
August 27, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 209 BytesIn his natural history of east-central Ohio, Idle Weeds, David Rains Wallace writes: “If time is a story, the present is merely a hiatus between the significant events that were and will be. "If time is an ocean, however, the present is not less important than other moments, which stretch away on all sides, any more than a single water molecule in an ocean is less important than the others.” I like this impression of time, especially as summer wanes. The changes in the leaves and flowers, the...
Poor Will's Almanack: August 20 - 26, 2019
August 20, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 187 BytesIt seems that the same day never returns, that any act is done when it is done. It seems that at the end of August, summer is over. It seems that this summer can never come again. Memory easily shows, however, that events do not end when they take place. Like the waves that form the Butterfly Effect, all happenings ripple time. And instead of receding from a present tense, this infinity of instances spins far out and then returns over and over again like a shower of shooting stars, shining ch...
Poor Will's Almanack: August 6 - 12, 2019
August 06, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 188 BytesAs Late Summer begins, all the katydids sing after sundown. They call out the close of the Dog Days, and even though heat often lingers, the rhythm of the season has shifted, its tones have been altered, colors and sounds and scents all pointing to fall. Migration clucking among the robins increases. Some days, there is a long and steady cardinal song before sunrise, then silence. Hummingbirds, wood ducks, Baltimore orioles and purple martins start to disappear south; their departure marks a ...
Poor Will's Almanck: July 30 - August 5, 2019
July 30, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 232 BytesIn his book, Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane writes about the role of imagination in a person’s approach to space and place. The mountains that people climb, he writes, must first exist and be conquered in their minds. When he actually climbed mountains, Macfarlane discovered “that the mountains one gazes at, reads about, dreams of and desires are not the mountains one climbs.” The real mountains are “matters of hard, steep rock and freezing snow…of vertigo…of hypertension, nausea an...
Poor Will's Almanack: July 23 - 29, 2019
July 23, 2019 14:40 - 3 minutes - 232 BytesThe philosopher and psychologist Carl Jung used the word, “synchronicity” to describe "temporally coincident occurrences" that may be related by their meaning. In the context of nature, the days themselves are formed and defined from “temporally coincident occurrences,” that is, events happening at the same time, events that reveal to the very blossom and tadpole the meaning of space and time. Things happen together: that is what makes the world make sense. Things like: The blooming of purple...
Poor Will's Almanack: July 16 - 22, 2019
July 16, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 239 BytesThere’s night and day, brother, both sweet things , writes George Borrow in a passage from his novel, Lavengro. There’s sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things…. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die? In my notes for this week of the year, I find myself in the middle of butterflies, days of color and nectar, drifting and soaring. These days, I can see were the sweetest. I remember one year four yellow and black tiger swallowtails all together a on deep purple butterfly bu...
Poor Will's Almanack: July 9 - 15, 2019
July 09, 2019 13:21 - 3 minutes - 220 BytesNow if we let ourselves believe, it might seem that summer will never end. Even in the face of the changes taking place around us, we might to choose to remain here in the center of the year where the heat and humidity create a backwater of time. This is the season in which anticipation cedes to acceptance. It is a time of self-deception. In the same way that the depths of winter seem to erase the possibility that the cold and gray can ever end, Deep Summer seems to promise only green leaves ...
Poor Will's Almanack: July 2 - 8, 2019
July 02, 2019 13:36 - 3 minutes - 210 BytesI walk into the woods and pastures to touch Deep Summer, finding August’s white snakeroot with huge buds, stinging wood nettle with its Late Summer petals, wingstem ready to open, parsnips half to seed but still flowering enough to make part of the field yellow, while the other part is white with daisy fleabane. Wild onions are blooming. Virginia roses still bright pink. Prickly buckeye fruits, an inch in diameter, are hanging from the trees. Canadian thistles are gray, some thistle down loos...
Poor Will's Almanack: June 25 – July 1, 2019
June 25, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 209 BytesThe Milkweed Bug Mating Moon was new and dark, just a shadow high in the east before dawn. The the rain had finally ended, and the barometer was rising. By the time the grackles woke up at 6:00, the chorus of cardinals and doves and sparrows was loud and raucous. Then a breeze passed through the trees, and the grackles became louder, their calls drowning out the other singers as the sun came up. This eruption of grackle activity takes place in my yard every year at the beginning of June. Almo...
Poor Will's Almanack: June 18 - 24, 2019
June 18, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 204 BytesThe dream of my life,” writes poet Mary Oliver, “Is to lie down by a slow river/and stare at the light in the trees -/ to learn something by being nothing/ A little while but the rich lens of attention.” Now these are the longest days of all, and if ever one might lie down by a slow river and stare at the light of the trees, these might be the days to do just that, and to learn something by being nothing. The simplest things might create such peace, the soft cottonwood cotton floating above t...
Poor Will's Almanack: June 11 - 17, 2019
June 11, 2019 10:44 - 3 minutes - 188 BytesSo much is going on outside that it’s hard to know what else is going on. And to make matters worse, when one thing happens, something else is happening, too. When great mullein blooms in the fields, then mock orange petals have all fallen and water willows are blossoming beside the streams. When elderberry bushes come into full flower and cottonwood cotton floats in the wind, then the first chiggers bite in the woods and garden. When the tall spikes of the yucca are in bloom, then Japanese b...