Almanac For Moderns: Rejoicing In The Noon Mercy

[More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.]

January Twenty-First

I wonder how much of fatality has come to the birds in the past week that I have been house-bound, while storm after storm swept the fields and woods, with alternate thaws followed cruelly by sleet. The papers tell of airplanes brought down with their fuselage ice-incrusted. It is not the cold that kills the birds, and somewhere, somehow, they always manage to find forage; it is winter rains that ground them too. For the titmouse that I come on stone dead in the woods, how many more small winged creatures are lying for the hawks and weasels to find, in the hills and on the fields!

Yet today, when I trudge abroad, just breaking through the stubborn crust at each tiring step, I hear the brave whistling and clinking notes of many little birds rejoicing in the noon mercy - though the mercury is below zero. I turn this way and that, trying to see them, but wherever I look the intolerable glare of the crusted snow, of the trees glittering in the silver mail, parries my sight like a cutting sword I cannot look into the eye of this ice-armored day; I can only bow my head and listen attentively, to the small indomitable voices of tree sparrows, white-throats and chickadees, ringing as bright and delicate as frost crystals become audible on the tingling air.

Almanac For Moderns: Howling White-Fanged Days

January Fourth

Now we are in the very lists of winter, and what a winter, with the Atlantic coast lashed with storm on storm, with ships crying at sea through the lost staccato of their wireless. Cold blowing out of the Arctic, out of Keewatin, on the wings of cyclones that engulf a continent in a single maelstorm, vanish in the east to be followed by another. Frost reaching a finger to the tender tip of tropic Florida. And here, fresh ice thickening upon the unmelted old; ice in the loops of the country telegraph wires, every tree locked in a silver armor, a sort of a white Iron Maiden that breaks their bones and listens with glee to the cracking sound. Something there is in our North American winters peculiarly sadistic -- with a pitiless love of inflicting suffering for its own sake wherever the poor are huddled in the smoky cities, wherever men, and women too, battle against the cold in lonely prairie houses. We have no Alps from west to east to block the way of roaring boreas, no southland protected against our north. Our mountains march with the north wind, and in the drafty gulfs between them, and along their outer flanks, raids the packs of the howling white-fanged days.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: Out Of All This Great Debris

[Editor's Note: I am working for the next few days on a borrowed PC, as the AOTR Macbook is currently under repair at a local shop. The style changes to these posts will be corrected when I am reunited with this laptop and its editing software. Thanks for your patience!]

November Twenty-Second

The end of autumn comes, and one by one the plants in their little stations and many small creatures hole up and turn to sleep. We feel a great longing for that sleep, in the woods, in the very air and the soil that nightly grows colder, a little less kindly. The year's great living settles to its close, and not alone because the harsher cycle demands it, but because it is in the nature of most things to rest. Winter has a meaning beyond the meteorological one; it is that surcease must compensate all this perfervid existence.

For many beings in the great packed store room, autumn represents finality. They will be thrown out complete as waste, all the annual plants, the ephemerid insects. They have their chance at immortality, I know, through seed and egg. But individually the time for them has come, the time to go. For species on the wane, each autumn, perhaps, represents a step toward extinction. So be it; it is written.

But out of all this great debris new forms will be made, as in the first place life took its origin in ways mysterious to us, and alighting like light from a star upon a dark dead world informed the water and the rock itself.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: Late In The Autumn

October Thirteenth

Late in the autumn, when the leaves of the buttonwood are turning deep as Burgundy and the cat-tails are ripening their silk, one little frog still sings his rather sad, metallic threnody. The sound, though small, is piercing, and for this reason he has been called the cricket frog. Cricket-like, he is but an inch and a half long, at the most, and he throws his voice with the ventriloquism of a Gryllus; it peeps and call from side to side of the boggy meadow; though I steal on footsteps that I would make as soft as a rabbit's tread, silence surrounds me where I walk, mockery clinks out from behind me.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: The Autumn Dance

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

September Seventeenth

Now the autumn dance of the midges has begun, and I distinguish by the motion of their little eddies and spiral nebulae the different sorts--the tiny fellows that spin in some invisible maelstrom, the larger dark ones that tremble up and down in one vertical plane as if against a sheet of glass, and the clover midges drifting thick as storms of diatoms in the plankton of the sea. But though I swing my hat at them, they are too swift for me. It is the bats, in their goblin flight, seemingly so drunken, in reality so accurate, who catch the midges in the twilight when my eyes just begin to fail of seeing anything but the great outlines of the trees, the humped shadows of shrubbery.

Zoologists will classify the bats upon the basis of their incredibly convoluted ears, their sometimes preposterous noses, and their always exaggerated toes that appear like the ribs of their wings. No marksman, I seldom get a good look at a bat, save when I have picked up a wounded creature from the ground, jittering angrily and glaring at me from its uncannily knowledgeable black eyes.

I could never see why any one should fear or dislike any bat of the temperate zone. How often I have lain wakeful, in a great old house by the sea, under the ghostly cascade of the mosquito curtain, and delighted in the companionship of the little bats who swept in through the open window, mysterious, soundless, flirting with their own reflections in the dusky pool of the great mirror.

Almanac For Moderns: A Month Of Sun

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

August Thirty-First

August, the aureate month, draws to its blazing close - a month of sun, if there was one. Gold in the grain on the round-backed hill fields. Gold in the wood sunflowers, and in the summer goldenrod waving plumes all through the woodlot, trooping down the meadow to the brookside, marching in the dust of the roadways. Gold in the wing of the wild canaries, dipping and twittering as they flit from weed to bush, as if invisible waves of air tossed them up and down. The orange and yellow clover butterflies seek out the thistle, and the giant sulphur swallowtails are in their final brood. The amber, chaff-filled dust gilds all the splendid sunsets in cloudless, burning skies. Long, long after the sun has set, the sun-drenched earth gives back its heat, radiates it to the dim stars; the moon gets up in gold; before it lifts behind the black fields to the east I take it for a rick fire, till it rises like an old gold coin, that thieves have clipped on one worn edge.

Almanac For Moderns: Good Poetry, Good Science

June Twenty-Sixth

As long as one knows little of Nature save that which impinges upon one sensually, one is subject to the moods it throws, like a shadow, across the spirit. But as soon as one begins to search for knowledge in the thing that dims the light, the power of mood fades. A biologist confined to the prison isle of Ste. Marguerite would soon set up some equipment or technique for studying the swallows--the pulsation of their crowding population, the control of their behavior, their effect upon the rest of the animal life of the island, or something else from which significant conclusions could be drawn.

I accept the challenge of the artists that cool investigation may often be the death of poetry. As knowledge lessens the terror of plague, so it may take some of the soulfulness out of nature. There is a sort of Wordsworthian sermonizing that shrinks before a biological frame of mind, just as the childish abhorrence of insects vanishes with familiarity. But not all poetry is really good poetry (however good it may sound). Good poetry is swift-winged, essential and truthful description--and so is good science.

June Twenty-Ninth

The merest beginning upon the little specializing in the swallows led me to the sandbank, to the burrowing bees and their beetle guests, and has sent my thoughts straying upon the biology of the social habit, to which life in a cliff seems to give rise. After all, our own ancestors were cliff dwellers. From there I have strayed in my musings to the nature of parisitism, as it is exhibited by the Hornia beetles, as well as, I learn, several other members of the same family. One may object that all this is reprehensibly diffuse. I should concentrate upon swallows, and not leave them for blister beetles until I know all about the birds. 

But the purpose of studying Nature at all, aside from the distraction which it affords, (and it is in the nature of distraction not to dwell on anything to the point of tedium) is that the study should illuminate the relation of living things to each other, to us, to the environment. One thing should lead to something quite other. Complexity is the keynote of biology--a fact which those who have been trained first in the exact or physical sciences can never seem to grasp. The goal of biological thought is ramification, many-viewpointedness, and a man who drops his swallows uncompleted because he has suddenly grown excited over beetles is simply a man who is growing.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: Cicada Song

June Twelfth

Nothing has done me more good than to hear that the cicadas have all got a plague. The newspapers are carrying stories about it. A blue-green mold which is always more or less present on the summer cicada has attacked the seventeen-year variety with terrific vehemence, and mycologists and entomologists alike are excited about it. Apparently the fungus does not kill more than a fraction of the dog-day cicadas, who have probably built up a certain resistance to it. The periodical cicadas, emerging in tremendous numbers, comparable to overcrowding in our city slums, are seized upon by the disease and their vitals swiftly eaten out. Spores for spreading the malady push out from the corpses and sow the air with death to others.

So, though the cicadas emerge by the billions of billions in fourteen different states, a check upon them is always waiting. I have found several cicadas being carried off by predatory wasps, and the woods about the house are suddenly alive with woodpeckers, chewinks, orioles, flickers, sparrows, grackles and robins, fattening on the winged harvest.

June Thirteenth

There is no diminution yet in the uproar, but my lightened heart gives me grace to take some interest in the biology of the creatures. The period of seventeen years is varied, in the southern states, to thirteen years, and the recurrence of the adults is further made irregular by the fact that there are more than a score of broods in different parts of the country, each having its own years for the rhythmic emergence, or, as we might say, starting off on a different beat, though all keeping the same rhythm. In some areas several broods overlap, so that the cicada years occur oftener than every seventeen years. Some of the broods occupy immense areas, but others are more restricted and feeble.

No other insect in the world has such a long life as this, nor a life history so disproportionate. To be sure, the summer cicada spends a year underground and another of life above it, but as there are two broods, we always have the common cicada with us. But the periodical cicada spends seventeen years as grub, and sometimes no better than seventeen days as a free creature of the sunlight and air. 

The fate of the insect seems miserable enough to us,  but in fact the strange life history is distinctly advantageous to the creature itself. Its seventeen years underground do not represent prison to the cicada, but comfort and safety, such as a mole or an earthworm knows. It is only when this animal, which we must regard as a naturally subterranean species, takes the dangerous step of emerging into the air that it has any reason to sorrow. For, as so often happens, the moment of sexual maturity is also the moment of predestined death. Nature flings the sexes at each other and then, having no more use of them, she draws her sword and slays them.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: The Voice At Midnight

June Fourth

I waited for them at the bottom of the hill, listening to the sounds in the hot night that had no intention of trying to sleep before the stroke of midnight. There was the distant hum and outcry of machines on the highway, which is now become, by a modern paradox, the most human of sounds. Beneath it ran the thirsty chanting of the insects in the dried grass. And listening, I heard more birds' voices than one would suppose. There were sleepy outcries from birds I could not guess--robins and catbirds, I think--and the calling of the whippoorwill somewhere three hills and dales away. Sometimes the song sparrow or the field sparrow spoke out suddenly from sleep, as if a dream had half awakened him. Then a voice arose--not drowsily or in petulance or fear--but in a genuine song, repeated at intervals, the canticle of some bird who was accustomed to sing vespers, and was at this best then, as the thrush sings best in twilight or the nightingale by moonlight. 

Presently my friends came along. I heard their laughter and it fell like broken glass on the solid darkness. The bird fell silent, and I went along with them, regretting the singer, and the moment I knew I should never forget, when I stood in the darkness by the spring, listening for the first time to some bird that was new to me.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: Bringing Back The Warbler

May Twenty-Ninth

Here is May, gone by, and with it will go something fresh and joyful that, I suppose, will not pass this way again in all the year. Of all months it is the floweriest. Never again, in this twelvemonth, will there be so many bird voices ringing out. There is little worth while, in any month, of which May does not have at least a little share, unless you are one of those robustious souls made of objectionably more solid stuff who prefer your trees naked, your flowers snow-covered and your birds sparrowish and cheepy. 

Myself, I am all for the joyful, the colored and carnival. May coaxes even the reluctant oaks to leaf, and brings back to us the very last warbler and tanager and oriole and cuckoo. It combines the first and best of the summer splendor with the innocence of the flora of April. 

Now is the moment when the woods begin to fill up with golden sundrops, and the banks are winey with the odor of wild grape and honeysuckle. The country lanes are a bower of flowering brambles, arching out on their prickly canes, spilling whiteness. Now all familiar spirits give voice in the downpouring of sunlight, the song-sparrow and the goldfinch and bluebird and all such small and merry choristers.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: The Homing Instinct

May Sixth

What can it be, this homing instinct, that brings the birds back to us every year? That brings the wrens and the swallows to the very same nests around the house and barn? That leads the carrier pigeon home across a hundred, five hundred miles? 

The trainer of pigeons has something significant to tell about this. He cannot release his birds for the first time in Moscow and expect them to fly home to Paris. He must first take them not a mile from home, and when they have learned all landmarks thoroughly, he may take them thirty or forty miles away. Each pigeon must be educated in its route. Birds, then, in their mirgrations would seem to have a memory for landmarks, and flying very high as they do, they see so much country in one little eyeful that the memory need not be burdened with a crushing weight of detail.

But the slippery question of the ways of birds upon their majestic travels will not rest as this. If it be true that the young of the season, who have never made the flight before, often travel in little jaunty bands of adolescents, as they appear to, without the oldsters accompanying them, then memory of landmarks cannot be all the story. Something else draws on their restless wings across the sea and the unbroken forest, some feeling in their light, air-filled bones, that sweeps them north in a grand phalanx in spring, and surges south with them in autumn.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: The Impermanent Sea

April Fourteenth

The tadpoles in the quiet bay of the brook are now far past the stage of inky black little wrigglers attached by their two little sticky pads to any stick or leaf, merely breathing through their gills, and lashing with their hair-fine cilia. A dark brown skin--really gold spots mottling the black--now proclaims the leopard frogs they will become. Now the hunger of the open mouths insatiable; a tadpole, when not resting in sheer exhaustion, will not (and I suppose could not safely) cease for one moment to eat. They all scrape the slime from the sticks and stones; they nibble the water weeds; they are launched upon life with all its appetites and delights and perils.

And what perils! The water is now alive with treacherous, fiercely biting back-swimmers and their cousins the giant water bugs with ugly sucking mouths. The dragonfly nymphs emerge as if perfectly timed to live upon a banquet of frog larvae prepared for them, tigers of the ponds with legs that snatch, and jaws that devour. Fish, turtles, and water birds might all well die in early spring but for the monstrous fertility of the female leopard frog. She must spawn enough children to pay tribute to hundreds of merciless ogre overlords and still more, so that by good fortune June shall hear the marshes rattling with her children's hymns. 

So already the contest is begun, not, in reality the battle between death and life, but life locked naked with life, in a sort of terrible mating of substances, dissolving and fusing from one species into another, one instant palpitant batrachian jelly and the next the wry croak of a stilted shorebird. 

April Fifteenth

There is one spot in my neighborhood where I can literally wade into the very medium of life itself, and that is the marsh and pond. With a net--or with nothing better than my hands, if need be, I can scoop up the teeming stuff of it--the decaying twigs bearing fresh-water sponges, the shard of a crayfish that went to make a meal for a bittern, the strands of the first algae, a handful of mud out of which small nameless things come kicking and twisting. Here is the world of the fairy shrimp, of the thin tubifex worms poised for retreat into their mud chimneys, the caddis-fly larvae, like centaurs with their dragging cases hampering half their bodies, of the transparent Leptodora, the phantom snatcher of that netherworld. 

All about me rise the cries of the redwings, sweet gurgling watery whistles, and the angry peent, peent when I come too near their nesting places.  The waters lap the tiny shores of this impermanent sea; the ancient sunlight warms me, and dances on the ripples. The feel of life, the joy of it, the thrill and the warmth of it are in my bones, and the same sensations penetrate, I know, to the very bottom of the pond.

April Sixteenth

Upon the bottom of any pond in spring are pastured its tiny grazing animals, its pollywogs and snails, its microscopic flagellates, each one of which will produce a thousand descendants in a month, its rotifers of which each, seventy hours after hatching from the eggs, becomes itself a spawning factory. Just above them wait and prowl the small creatures of prey, the crayfish and the tigerish dragonfly nymphs, the nymphs of the mayflies, agile as minnows. Voracity awaits these too; they are destined to vanish down greater jaws and bills and gullets. Life in the casual pond, like life in the sea or the jungle, is like a pyramid with the multiplex and miniform for the broad base.

A bucketful of water may support ten thousand copepods; but a water snake may require a marsh to himself, as a whale needs league upon league of sea, or a bear the half of a mountainside. It is a question if there be any biologic advantage in mastering your environment when you need such a quantity of it to support you. Necessity presses just as sternly on the great beasts as on the small. The problem of population and food is the same, and the increased consciousness of the so-called higher forms is harshly compensated for by their increased capacity for suffering. True, it were pleasanter to eat than be eaten, but in the end even kings must come to dirt.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: A Charmed Circle

March Twenty-Sixth

Out of the stoa, two thousand years ago, strode a giant to lay hold on life and explain it. He went down to the "primordial slime" of the seashore to look for its origin. There is anywhere he would find it, he thought, where the salt water and the earth were met, and the mud quivered like a living thing, and from it emerged strange shapeless primitive beings, themselves scarce more than animate bits of ooze. To Aristotle, it seemed plain enough that out of the dead and the inanimate is made the living, and back to death are turned the bodies of all things that have lived, to be used over again. So nothing was wasted; all moved in a perpetual cycle. Out of vinegar, he felt certain, came vinegar eels, out of dung came blow-flies, out of decaying fruit bees were born, and out of the rain pool frogs spawned.

But the eye of even Aristotle was purblind in its nakedness. Of the spore and the sperm he never dreamed; he guessed nothing of bacteria. Now man can peer down through the microscope, up at the revealed stars. And behold, the lens has only multiplied the facts and deepened the mystery.

For now we know that spontaneous generation never takes place. Life comes only from life. Was not the ancient symbol for it a serpent with a tail in its mouth? Intuitive old fellows, those Aryan brothers of ours, wise in their superstitions, like old women. Life, we discover, is a closed, nay, a charmed circle. Wherever you pick it up, it has already begun; yet as soon as you try to follow it, it is already dying.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: The Unwritten Moment

March First

Now is that sweet unwritten moment when all things are possible, are just begun. The little tree has not quite leafed. The mate is not yet chosen. To the rambler in the woods all that he can find in heavy books will be of less worth than what he learns by sitting on a log and listening to the first quiver of sound from the marshes, or by prodding with a stick at the soil and turning out the sluggish beetles. It is good enough just to sit still and hold your palm out to the sunlight, like a leaf, and turn it over slowly, wondering: What is light? What is flesh? What is it to be alive?

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: The Frayed End of Winter

February Fifth

The month of February has many fine points, and not the least of them that it is soonest over. Some months had to be distinctly shorter than the others, since twelve does not divide equally into the solar year of three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes and forty-five seconds and fifty-one hundredths of a second. The rectification of the calendar has required not only leap years but an elaborate centenarian system of skipping leap years to split this knotty fraction. The only odd thing is that men should have chosen the second month to bear the irregularities. 

The fact is, of course, that February was the last month in the English calendar until 1752, and so it took of the year what was left over. I still think the old calendar was more satisfying. New Year resolutions die notoriously young, because the frayed end of winter wears down our souls. The gods have done what they could for February by putting in Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays, and St. Valentine's day, and so many birthdays of famous naturalists that the maker of this almanac is embarrassed by the wealth of his material, for secretly the sap is rising, hard little buds are forming, and his mind will be coaxed from the past as the days lighten.

For it is in the nature of things that the lowest ebb of the living year is also the most prescient and significant; it is, for the year, the instant of conception, that moment when forces fundamentally abstract determine what it is that shall be born alive when spring is at the full.

February Sixth

Winter is a guest that stays beyond its welcome and I am not complaining merely of cold and thaw, thaw and cold. I dislike the loneliness of winter, the flowerlessness of the ground. I miss the birds.

To those who honestly prefer a titmouse or a junco to mockingbirds and mourning doves, I have nothing to answer save that it raises my spirits mightily to remember that somewhere, throbbing on summery air, there are hummingbirds. The gorgeous whistling oriole, the scarlet tanager, the indigo bird, the wood thrush and the bobolink--they are all there in the south and in the tropics, waiting the appointed hour of return or perhaps already taking off. 

Before I sleep I close my eyes and try to think of them. I see the map of the continents outspread, in a bird's eye view, snow-wrapt at the north, brown still or faintly greening in the half-sleeping Carolinas, with palm-tipped Florida reaching out into the Gulf. From the West Indies slumbering in the Carribean, from the jungles of Orinoco and the pampas of Argentine, our own will return to us. It is long and long before their coming; the skies still ache for them. Yet they are astir, upon the move, dauntless, and forgiving us our trespasses against them.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: The Symmetry of Snow

January Thirteenth

That about snow crystals which confounds all understanding is how so many variations--millions perhaps--can be schemed upon the unvarying fundamental plan of six. Be it etched out to elaborations as fine feathered as a whole pane covered with frost designs, still there are always six rays to each delicate star, and one can still make out in the finest, the ultimate details of attenuated ornamentation, the same fundamental symmetry. There can be no chance about this; some cause underlies it, and I am no crystallographer to explain the details of a snowflake's fine-wrought surfaces, its internal tensions and stresses, it perfect equilibria and balanced strains that distend each fairy tracery of give to these flowers of the winter air their gossamer strength. 

But one may hazard the guess that the six-sidedness of the snow crystal is in reality a doubling of three, just as the symmetry of the lily and the amaryllis is. Of all the magic numbers in old necromancy and modern science, three is the first. Three dimensions has matter; three is the least number of straight sides that will just enclose a space. Three legs is the smallest number that will just support the equilibrium and stresses of a stool. Two would not do; four are superfluous; and twice three points are required, and just required, to keep intact the frailest of all solids--a flake of snow. 

[More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.]

An Almanac For Moderns: Solstice to Christmas

[More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.]

December Twenty-Second

Now is the darkest hour of all the year, the winter solstice. We are arrived at the antipodes of brave midsummer, when it was once the custom for men to while away the hours of the short night with bonfires and a blowing of conches and a making of wild young marriages, that men might hold the earth for the sun god during his brief descent beneath the horizon. But at this season of the year, when the sun was a pallid blur behind a junco-colored sky, a darkness fell upon the spirits of all men, and a splinter of ice was in their hearts. To some of us the winter solstice is an unimportant phase of terrestrial astronomy; of old it must have produced an emotional reaction which a Christian can only experience on Good Friday, and the breath-held Saturday that follows. 

It is not the cold of far northern lands that drives the human animal to despair; cold is tingling, exciting, healthful, and it can, in a limited way, be overcome. It is the darkness that conquers the spirit, when the northern sun does not rise until late, only to skim low upon the horizon for an hour or two, and set. Now indeed is Balder slain of the mistletoe. Now life is at its lowest ebb, and the mind conceives a little what it will be like when the sun has burned to a red ember, its immense volume dissipated by constant radiation, and the earth drifted far out into space, the shrinking sun no longer able to hold her child upon a leash so close.

December Twenty-Fourth

When I set out to buy a Christmas tree, I have my choice of long-needled pines, red cedars, and fragrant spruces with narrow spire-like tops, the branches beautifully up-curved at the dark tips. But I am looking for a balsam, which has this inestimable advantage over all the spruces, that even in the warmth of the house its needles do not drop.

You may know a balsam from a spruce in this way, that the leaves of the balsam are flattish, and the cones are borne erect; on many of the branches the leaves are two-ranked, so that they appear to form a flat spray, while in the spruces the needles are scattered, bristling out in every direction from the stem, to the touch seeming four-sided; and the cones of a fir always droop.

Time was, not long ago, when a man bought a Christmas tree in all innocence, feeling that it was no really material expenditure but a symbol, almost intangible, which gave beauty and good cheer to all who beheld it. Now come the tree conservationists, to reproach us with the forests that we slay to make a brief holiday, to let them die then ingloriously upon the rubbish heap. But balsam is only used in a small way in the crafts and sciences, while the spruces, by far the commonest holiday trees, have, otherwise, only the pulp mill for their destiny. 

And the Christmas trees cut for the city across the river would not suffice to put out the combined Sunday editions of its newspapers in one week, bearing into every home their freight of unchallenged intellectual poison--the brutal humor, the worldly inanity, the crime and psuedo-science. 

December Twenty-Fifth

It was Francis of Assisi, I believe, the man who called the wind his brother and the birds his sisters, who gave the world the custom of exhibiting créche in church, where barn and hay, soft-breathing beasts, flowing breast and hungry babe, shepherd and star are elevated for delight. One who has spent a Christmas in some southern country, where an early Christianity still reigns, will understand how all else that to us means the holy festival is quite lacking there. It was originally, and still sometimes is, no more than a special Mass, scarcely as significant as Assumption, much less so than Easter. Out of the North the barbarian mind, forest born, brought tree worship, whether of fir or holly or yule log. It took mistletoe from the druids, stripped present-giving from New Year (where in Latin lands it still so largely stays) and made of Christmas a children's festival, set to the tune of the beloved joyful carols. It glorified woman and child and the brotherhood of men in a way that the Church in, let us say, the second century, dreamed not on. 

You will search the four Gospels in vain for a hint of the day or the month when Christ was born. December twenty-fifth was already being celebrated in the ancient world as the birthplace of the sun god Mithras, who came out of a rock three days after the darkest of the year. His birth was foretold of a star that shepherds and magi beheld. The ancient Angles had long been wont to hold this day sacred as Modranecht or Mother Night. This still do we flout old winter with green tree, and old morality with child worship.

An Almanac For Moderns: Hunting Season

November Tenth

The folk who want to shoot ducks, and the naturalists who would protect them, meet, occasionally, in conventions and in the lobbies of legislatures. They have this much in common, in the present day, that they are both interested in duck conservation, for sportsmen have begun to understand that unless they restrain each other, there will soon be nothing to shoot. It is the contention of the fowlers that the ladies and professors who make up the conservative ranks are as incapable of understanding why a man wants to shoot as pacifists of seeing how a soldier can find war ennobling.

Hunters, like pipe smokers, are recruited from two antipodal types of men--gentlemen and worthless loafers. I will say this for them all, that as I know them, they are naturalists of a sort. They know the ways of a rabbit as a dog knows them, the ways of a duck as a hawk does. They have a fund of intimate observation upon Nature exactly as it is, that might be envied by the behaviorists putting caged creatures through mazes and paces. Without the least poetry in their way of expressing it, they are none the less appreciators of the wilderness in a fashion scarcely possible to the city dweller, for when they go into the marshes, or in the brown fields or the silvered woods they must proceed to their quarry by accurate observation. They know what to expect as the norm and what is out of the way. The very fact that a hunter is following a trail to kill arouses instincts in him that observe more than the diffident, tolerant student can hope to notice.

November Eleventh

I remember the first baldpate duck I ever saw, floating upon a marsh, in a cold evening damp--floating motionless, with speckled and green head, and blue bill outstretched lovingly upon the water, the exquisite mantle of brownish gray laved by the wind-driven dark ripples, the green and black-bordered wings outspread as if in an ecstasy to catch the wind. So, like a lovely boat, this creature of beauty drove on before the breeze, toward open water, more graceful and more silent than a swan--and dead. Gone was the fowler who had wounded him, but failed to retrieve him. With the bullet in his body the wild thing had still fought for its life, got clear away--to die unconquered, its proud plumage still unplucked; to drift, like this, a Viking's funeral, between the water and the sky.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Almanac For Moderns: The Moment Of Abundance

October Twenty-Fifth

The keynote of spring is growth amongst the plants, reproduction amongst the animals. In summer it is the reverse; it is the plants that reproduce, the animals that grow. But autumn is the time of fattening. Now the beech nuts ripen their oily kernals; the walnut swells its rich meat through black wooden labyrinths; the wild rice stands high in the marshes, and the woods are filled with their jolly harvest of berries, blue buckthorn and scarlet bittersweet, black catbrier, holly and mistletoe and honeysuckle. The great green cannonballs of the osage orange drop from the prickly hedges with a thud; under the little hawthorns a perfect windfall of scarlet pomes lies drifted, and in the sun the bitter little wild crabs reach their one instant of winy, tangy, astringent perfection. 

This is the moment of abundance for all our brother animals. The harvest mouse is now a wealthy little miser; squirrels can afford the bad investments they make. Opossums paw over the persimmons and pawpaws, picking only the tastiest, and like a cloud the cowbirds and grackles and bobolinks wing southward over the wild rice fields, so fat and lazy that the fowler makes an easy harvest of them. Everywhere, on frail bird bones, under the hides of chipmunk and skunk and all four-footed things, fat, the animal's own larder and reserve, is stored away against the bitter months, against the lean hunger and long sleep.

[More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.]

Almanac For Moderns: Autumn's Saturnalia

[More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.]

September Twenty-Fourth

I try each year to disbelieve what my senses tell me, and to look at the harvest moon in a cold and astronomical light. I know that it is a small cold sphere of rock, airless, jagged and without activity. But the harvest moon is not an astronomical fact. It is a knowing thing, lifting its ruddy face above the rim of the world. Even to the thoroughly civilized mind, where caution for the future is supposed to rule all impulse, the orange moon of autumn invites the senses to some saturnalia, yet no festival of merriment. The harvest moon has no innocence, like the slim quarter moon of a spring twilight, nor has it the silver penny brilliance of the moon that looks down upon the resorts of summertime. Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus, it waxes night after night.

September Twenty-Fifth

Now is that opulent moment in the year, the harvest, a time of cream in old crocks in cool, newt-haunted spring-houses, of pears at the hour of perfection on old trees bent like women that, as the Bible says, bow down with child. In the field the grain stands, a harsh forest of golden straw nodding under the weight of the bearded spikes, and in that, it has been swept and all its fruitfulness carried off to fill the barns.

One will not see here, save in the steep tilted Blue Ridge farms, the man reaping by sickle in his solitary field, while his daughters bind the sheaves, nor the bouquet of wheat and pine boughs hung above the grange gable that is crammed to the doors. But we have our own sights and sounds at harvest time. There is the roar and the amber dust of the threshing machines, the laughter of the children riding home on the hayricks, the warfare of the crows and grackles in the painted woods, and the seething of juice in the apple presses. Then night falls and the workers sleep. The fields are stripped, and only the crickets chant in the midnight chill of the naked meadow. 

September Twenty-Sixth

Already the woods are filling up with grackles, gathering into bands. They storm like a black cloud through the groves and descend with a sound like the pattering of rain drops, as they alight with their little guttural exclamations in the boughs. They are not going very far--perhaps no more than south of the thirty-first parallel, but they make a much greater to-do about it than many bound for the tropics. Al this fussing and gabbling and preening, and starting only to scurry back, reminds me of the New England old maid who said she would rather be ready to go and not go, than go and not be ready. Such people never will go far, and the majority of them will never be ready. Only those who start without demanding that they shall be comfortable en route and able to maintain a well-preened appearance, will ever see Vineland rising from the wild brown foam.