Category: Time of the Season

“Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.”

 Andy Goldsworthy

See stars in the changing season and dance among them, shining.

Mary Anne Radmacher

Here delicate snow-stars, out of the cloud,
Come floating downward in airy play,
Like spangles dropped from the glistening crowd
That whiten by night 
the milky way.
–“The Snow-Shower,” by William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)

I feel lucky to be a Marylander. We’re fortunate to see the seasons bleed into one another while our landscape gradually shifts around us. As swift and grand an entrance Autumn makes, coaxing the annual crowds of “leaf peepers”, we double take as she coyly dissipates after a mere few weeks. As if she stole the stars above, she marks our rural roads with glints of crystalized trails, an invisible map only managed by the richness of the moon. The days grow longer, the fissures of ice have no choice but to surrender into puddles of mud. Spring saunters in, teasing us with bouts of warmth scattered among the loitering winter days. A familiar seasonal tale, that we all know too well. Our eyes flutter open to a sight for sore eyes. Trees grow obese with succulent emerald leaves that burst from countless buds. Tasseled sleeves fashion the arms of elder pines, bowing down as they touch the earth. Families of serpentine ivy crash and collide, choking neighboring geriatric trunks, suffocating any traces of dun and scorched flora; their chaotic embrace leave only the sweetest viridescent shades of summer behind.

The tonic twilight yawns, casting droplets of dew that radiate like a myriad of Jasper. Breaches in the clouds spill an invincible iridescence that clarifies and nurses the sear-spotted grounds, healing wounds from the dry afternoons of Autumn and the gelidity mornings of Winter. She eventually succumbs, melting into the invincible glow of a horizon renewed. As nature things, we inherently form cocoons around these algid days, wrapping the season around us like a childhood blanket. Triggered, we lounge and mask in the familiar warmth of nostalgia, soaking up the season’s diffusing aura like a trite kitchen sponge. She retreats from the sky a wee bit earlier and rises now a wee bit later with every passing morning. Roused with the change, she wakes to the irenic songs and heavyhearted hymns that drown out thwarted apologies: whispers of seasonal remorse echoing an unquenchable thirst for the familiarity, forever pining for that forgotten sense; some though… are fortunate to taste that sweet sense of nostalgia with a ride down rural roads. She stretches and spreads her tepid rays that zigzag and seep into the cracks of black-out curtains.  She casts warm, threadbare-like shapes that creep up bedroom walls, beckoning us to rise and shine.

Canopies of archaic trees oscillate and kiss the ancient sky. Below, cliques of bare naked limbs gyrate to the requiem of nature. The sincerity of light stalks the woods edge, precipitating a reflection of red garnet hues. With arms wide open, we welcome the season change as the zephyr’s notes embrace us like an old friend. The migrating winds shift and collide, electrifying the mellisonant air, stimulating the deep, weary cells that lie dormant within us. The atmosphere’s modifying presence summons an abstruse awakening that cloaks the amethyst stained sky which cradles the full Snow Moon. It’s always the time of the season.🎴

the many faces of the snow moon☾

The explanation behind February’s full Moon name is a fairly straightforward one: it’s known as the Snow Moon due to the typically heavy snowfall that occurs in February. On average, February is the United States’ snowiest month, according to data from the National Weather Service. In the 1760s, Captain Jonathan Carver, who had visited with the Naudowessie (Dakota), wrote that the name used for this period was the Snow Moon, “because more snow commonly falls during this month than any other in the winter.” 

Names for this month’s Moon have historically had a connection to animals. The Cree traditionally called this the Bald Eagle Moon or Eagle Moon. The Ojibwe Bear Moon and Tlingit Black Bear Moon refer to the time when bear cubs are born. The Dakota also call this the Raccoon Moon; certain Algonquin peoples named it the Groundhog Moon, and the Haida named it Goose Moon.

Another theme of this month’s Moon names is scarcity. The Cherokee names of Month of the Bony Moon and Hungry Moon give evidence to the fact that food was hard to come by at this time.

the next full moon