The first morning of the new year I sat in the same chair by the same window with the same mug and looked out at the same yard I have been looking at for fourteen years. The juncos were on the platform. The cardinal pair was in the dogwood. A red squirrel I have been arguing with since October was trying to figure out a new approach to the suet block, which I had moved two feet to the left in late December for exactly this reason.

An almanac, the kind farmers used to keep, is just a year laid down on paper. Mine is unwritten but I carry it in a rough way in my head. I know, more or less, what the yard does in each week. I know when the goldfinches lose their yellow and when they get it back. I know when the white-throated sparrows leave and when they return. I know that the first big push of warblers comes through the back hedge somewhere between the second and third week of April, and that if I miss it I will not see those species again for a year.

How a Personal Almanac Builds Itself

This kind of knowing accumulates by accident. You do not set out to learn the timetable of a small piece of ground. You just live on it long enough and pay enough attention that the timetable assembles itself in the background. By year five or six you start being able to predict things. By year ten the predictions are good. By year fourteen you are mostly just watching to see what is the same and what has shifted, and it is the shifts that have your attention.

This year a few things were different. The goldfinches did not leave in the same week they usually do. They lingered into early November, which I do not remember happening before. The first hard frost was nearly two weeks late. The downy woodpecker came to the suet by the second week of October, which is on the early side. None of these is a dramatic change. Most of them could be just the noise of a single year, with no signal in them. But you only know the difference between noise and signal by keeping watch long enough that the patterns separate from the wobble.

A Few Things That Were Different This Year

Toward the end of last fall I drove down to a river town a few hours south where my brother had moved, and we spent a Saturday afternoon out on the levee with binoculars while the tugboats passed and the wind came up off the water. There is a riverboat casino at the edge of the town, lit up against the bluff, and the contrast of it against the cottonwoods and the slow brown water gave me an image I have not been able to shake. Two kinds of time, both running at once, both indifferent to each other. The casinos along that stretch of river have been there for thirty years now, and the cottonwoods have been there for a hundred and fifty, and the river itself has been doing what it does for longer than either of them.

I came back from that weekend with a stronger sense of how much of an almanac is just the slow part of the landscape staying still long enough for the fast parts to be visible against it. The casino is the fast part. The yard, this yard, is the slow part for me. I do not have a river and I do not have cottonwoods. I have a dogwood and a lilac and a fence line, and the same juncos every November.

Two Kinds of Time on the Same River

If you want to keep an almanac of your own, you do not need a notebook, though one helps. What you really need is a chair by a window and the willingness to sit in it more than once. Year one will tell you nothing. Year two will give you a few patterns to compare. By year five you will have the rough shape of a place, and by year ten you will know it well enough to notice when it is off.

I started this practice fourteen years ago. The window has not moved and neither has the chair. The yard has changed in small ways and the world has changed in large ones, and the watching has stayed the same. Today is one more day on the same patch, which is what an almanac actually keeps, when you strip away the dates and the lists and the counts.