This seventh volume of A DAYBOOK FOR THE YEAR IN YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, is a memoir, extended meditation and guidebook to the month of July in southwestern Ohio, as well as in the Middle Atlantic region and much of the East and Southeast. My daily, weekly and monthly weather summaries have been distilled from over thirty years of observations, and they offer a statistical description of each day. Although information about the Yellow Springs microclimate at first seemed too narrow to be of use to those who lived outside my area, I found that I could adjust my data to meet the needs of a number of regional and national farm publications for which I started writing in the mid 1980s. Soon I was finding that what had happened in Yellow Springs was applicable to many other parts of the country. In the Natural Calendar sections of this DAYBOOK I note the progress of foliage and floral changes, farm and garden practices, migration times for common birds and peak periods of insect activity. At the beginning of this volume, I have included a floating calendar that lists average blooming dates for wildflowers that blossom between April and June in an average Yellow Springs season. Although the flora of the eastern and central United States is hardly limited to the species mentioned here, the flowers listed are common enough to provide easily recognized landmarks for gauging the advance of the year in most areas east of the Mississippi.The DAYBOOK journal itself consists of my notes on what I saw happening around me in Yellow Springs between 1979 and 2017. It is a collection of observations made from the window of my car and from my walks in Glen Helen, in other parks and wildlife areas within a few miles of my home, and on occasional trips. The cumulative format of the DAYBOOK, which brings together all of the annual entries for the same day through the span of over thirty years, has shown me the regularity of the changes in the seasons, and it fleshes out a broad, multi-faceted picture of each segment of the year. This daily record and the natural calendar summaries, then, are records of moveable seasonal feasts that shift not only according to geographical regions but also according to the weather in any particular year. They are a phenological handbook for the days. In addition, they can be used as an informal base line for monitoring future changes in local climate.The passages from ancient and modern writers which accompany each day's notations are lessons from my readings, as well as from distant seminary and university training, here put to work in service of the reconstruction of my sense of time and space. They are a collection of reminders, hopes and promises for me that I find implicit in the seasons. They have also become a kind of a cosmological scrapbook for me, as well as the philosophical underpinning of this narrative.
This DAYBOOK began with the gift of a barometer. My wife, Jeanie, gave the instrument to me when I was succumbing to graduate school stress and it became not only an escape from intense academic work, but the first step on the road to a different kind of awareness about the world. From the start, I was never content just to watch the barometric needle; I had to record its movement, then graph it. From my graphs, I discovered that the number of cold fronts each month is more or less consistent, and that the Earth breathes at an average rate of about once every three to five days in the winter, and once each six to eight days at the peak of summer. From watching the weather, it was an easy step to watching wildflowers. Identifying plants, I saw that flowers were natural allies of my graphs, and that they were parallel measures of the seasons and the passage of time. were quite useful in establishing sequence of bloom which always showed me exactly where I was in the progress of the year. When I came with my family to Yellow Springs, Ohio, a small town just beyond the eastern edge of the Dayton suburbs, I began to write a nature almanac for the local newspaper. To my weather and wildflower notes I added comments on foliage changes, bird migration dates, farm and gardening cycles, and the rotation of the stars. The more I learned about Yellow Springs, the more I found applicable to the world beyond the village limits. The microclimate in which I immersed myself gradually became a key to the extended environment; the part unlocked the whole. My Yellow Springs gnomon that measured the movement of the Sun also measured my relationship to every other place on earth. My engagement with the natural world, which began as an escape from academia, finally turned into a way of getting private bearings and of finding what I loved and believed. It was a process of spiritual as well as physical reorientation. In that way, all the historical statements in this collection of notes are the fruit of a strong desire to define where I am and what happens around me.
