The First Day of Autumn

Image by Peggychoucair from Pixabay

Though no one living in the swaths of land to the south would believe it, today is the first day of Autumn. By the Anglo-Saxon calendar, that is—which, honestly, is the way to go, and I’ll argue that point with my last breath, but that’s neither here nor there.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, and even in some countries today, the seasons were not reckoned by the stars as they are today in the U.S. The longest day of the year marked midsummer, not the start of summer, and the shortest day of the year signaled midwinter. The solstices and equinoxes fell in the middle of their respective seasons, not the start.

So August 7 is the first day of autumn and the start of the harvest, with the autumnal equinox on September 22 marking mid-autumn for the Northern Hemisphere. A discussion of this and how it played out a thousand years ago can be found here.

Winter was so cold and long last year that we hardly had any spring—the article above is not wrong (“Winter byð cealdost, lencten hrimigost - he byð lengest ceald - Winter is coldest, spring frostiest - it is the longest cold -”)—and I’m not ready for it to return, yet. But it is what it is, and hopefully, we’ll have a true autumn for three months, and a milder winter.

My plan is to sow wild rice along the shoreline of my pond, so I have some work to do in the coming weeks to prepare for planting in October.

May you all have a blessed Autumn, whenever you commemorate it.