Phenology
Phenology: the study of the timing of seasonal events in nature, such as flowering, migration, and leaf fall. These entries are from the nature journal kept by Ruth Adebayo-Lind of Cedar Falls, Iowa, a retired middle-school science teacher. Her son found it and shared it.
March 21. First crocus, by the south step, three days earlier than last year. Robins back on the 18th. Red-winged blackbirds at the creek. Thirty-one years of this notebook and the dates creep earlier every decade, the way everyone says they do. I’d tell my students: this is how you see climate, not in headlines, in a crocus.
Raked the last of the leaves out of the beds. Gordon always did it in October and I never do, so they sit all winter. Leaves under the apple tree are still thick. Will get them this weekend.
March 28. Strange thing. Raked under the apple tree and the leaves came back. Not blown in. I raked the circle bare Saturday and Monday it was covered again, a perfect ring under the canopy, brown and wet and curled, the way they look in late fall. The rest of the yard is bare and green.
The apple tree has no leaves yet, so they didn’t come from it. Wind from the neighbor’s maples, maybe.
April 6. The apple has buds now. But they’re not opening on the inside half of the tree, the half that hangs over the circle. On that half, the twigs are bare and dark, and this morning there was a single dead leaf hanging on one, curled and brown. As if it had grown and died already.
Took the soil thermometer out. Lawn by the fence: 52°F. Under the apple, inside the circle of leaves: 38°F. I took it three times.
April 12. Frost inside the circle this morning. Nowhere else. A clean ring of white on the leaves, about nine feet across, with green grass around it. It’s 61 degrees out.
I stood at the edge in my slippers. I put my hand over the line and it was like putting it into a refrigerator. And there was a smell. Woodsmoke and wet leaves and something else that I knew but couldn’t place.
April 13. I placed it. Cider. Gordon’s cider. He used to press the windfalls from this tree in the garage every October.
April 20. Kept thinking about the frost, so I did what I’d tell any student to do: observations, measured, repeated. Thermometer readings morning and evening at the circle’s center and at its edge. Center is consistently 35–40°F. The edge drops off sharply over a few inches. Diameter of the circle, measured with Gordon’s surveyor’s tape: 9 feet 4 inches.
The leaves inside it are apple leaves. I checked against a field guide. They aren’t from the neighbor’s maples. They’re from this tree. Last fall’s? But I raked them out.
April 27. Diameter 10 feet 1 inch. It’s getting larger.
A robin walked into it this morning from the lawn, hunting worms. As it crossed the line it stopped and puffed up, and turned in a circle, confused, and then it flew straight up and away south, very fast, the way they do in autumn. I watched it go. It didn’t come back.
May 3. Things inside the circle, as of today: apple leaves, brown, fallen. Frost most mornings. The inside branches of the tree bare, with a few last dead leaves. A single wrinkled apple on the ground near the trunk that wasn’t there yesterday, half-eaten by something, wasp-hollowed.
Outside the circle: lilacs blooming, the lawn needs its first mowing. Orioles at the feeder.
The circle is October. I am a trained observer and I’m writing it down plainly. Under my apple tree it is the end of October.
May 9. I took the calendar out of the kitchen and looked. Gordon died on October 30th, two years ago, in the afternoon, out here. Raking. They said it was his heart. I was at the store. I came home and the rake was under the apple tree and he was lying on the leaves.
I’m not going to write anything else about that today.
May 14. Diameter 12 feet 6 inches. It now reaches the edge of the vegetable bed. The pea vines nearest it have blackened, frost-killed.
I stood at the line this evening at dusk with a cup of tea. The air coming off the circle was very cold and smelled of smoke and cider. Inside it the light is different. The rest of the yard is in a long May evening, pink and gold. Inside the circle it’s later, grayer, the short low light of late fall, as if that part of the yard is on a different clock.
And I heard raking.
Faint. The scratch and drag of a rake on leaves. Somewhere inside the circle, though there was nobody in it. The steady rhythm of somebody who’s raked a lot of leaves in his life and isn’t in any hurry.
May 15. I stepped in.
I want to record it accurately. It’s cold, the way it’s cold on the last afternoons of October, damp in the bones. The light changes immediately, as though a cloud covers the sun. The sound of the street disappears, and the birds. The raking gets louder. It’s coming from just around the trunk, on the side I can’t see from the line.
I didn’t go around the trunk. I stood for a minute and listened to him rake. Then I stepped out. My hands were red with cold. My tea had a skin of ice on it.
May 19. Called my son, Peter, in Minneapolis. I didn’t tell him. I asked him if he remembered what his father was wearing that day. He said his old brown barn coat. He asked why. I said I was cleaning out the closet.
May 22. Diameter 15 feet 2 inches. It’s reached the corner of the house. The downspout on that side has icicles.
I’ve been going in every evening. I stand a little nearer the trunk each time. Last night I saw the rake. It was leaning against the far side of the tree, the old wooden one with the split handle that I gave to the church sale after the funeral. The leaves around it were piled into a neat heap. Somebody’s half-finished job.
May 26. I saw his coat. Just the sleeve. Brown canvas, from behind the trunk, an elbow, moving with the raking. Then it stopped. The raking stopped, and the elbow was still, as if he’d heard me.
I stepped out quickly. I’m not sure why. I’ve wanted to see him every day for two years.
I think it’s because I know what time it is in there. I know what the light means. It’s late afternoon, the last of the day. And in a little while he’s going to set down the rake and put his hand to his chest, and lie down on the leaves. And I wasn’t there. That’s what I’ve never forgiven. I was at the store.
May 30. Diameter 19 feet. Inside it now: the whole back half of the apple, the vegetable bed, the corner of the back porch, and the kitchen window. When I stand at the sink it’s October in my kitchen. The window is frosted at the edges. Through it I can see the rake moving.
The neighbor came over and asked if I’d noticed my yard looked “funny.” She said it looked like I had a dead patch. I said it was a fungus. She asked why there were dead leaves, in May. I said it was a type of fungus.
June 2. Peter called. He wants to come down this weekend. I told him not yet. I told him I’m fine. I am fine.
I’ve been reading back through the journal. Thirty-one springs. I’ve written down the first crocus every single year. I’ve never once written down the last of anything. That’s not how phenology works. You record arrivals. Nobody records the last robin. You just notice, some day in November, that you haven’t seen one in a while.
June 4. The circle reaches the back door. It’s 84 degrees out today, the first real heat, and the kitchen is cold enough that I’ve put on my sweater. I can smell the cider all through the house.
Tomorrow it will cover the door, and then I won’t have to decide anything, because I’ll be standing in October already when I come downstairs. I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been thinking that might be the coward’s way.
I’ve decided I’d rather walk in.
He’ll be raking, around the side of the tree, in his brown coat, and I’ll come up behind him and he’ll turn, and I’ll be there this time. It’ll be the afternoon. It will be the day. I’ll know what’s coming, and he won’t, and I’ll hold his hand for whatever’s left of it.
I don’t know what happens when the light goes, in there. I suppose it becomes November. I suppose that’s all right.
Last entry for the spring, then:
First crocus: March 21. First robin: March 18. Last frost: not yet.
Note from Peter Lind: I drove down on the 6th. The back door was open. The house was cold, though it was ninety outside, and there were dead apple leaves on the kitchen floor. Mom wasn’t there. I found her journal on the table, and her reading glasses, and a cup of tea with ice in it.
The yard was normal. Green grass, the peas, the apple tree in full leaf. The only odd thing was a neat little pile of brown leaves under the tree, raked together, with my father’s old rake lying across the top of it, the one we gave away.
The police are still looking. I’ve kept the house. I go and sit under the tree in the evenings and I wait for it to get cold. I’ve marked October 30th on my calendar. I’m going to be there at the house, in the afternoon, this time.