From time to time, I am visited by depressions, sometimes light, sometimes deep. The morning of March 12th, I woke up to one of those darker moods in which nothing seemed right or meaningful.

I took a semester of Greek back in 1959, but then I got sidetracked for a while and didn't pick up the language again until 1988. Over the past five decades, I've learned and relearned the Greek alphabet and 47 different phrases by famous authors, several hundred vocabulary words, the major pronouns and articles, and a number of verb tenses. At my current rate of progress, I might be able to read the Odyssey by Homer by the year 2340 when I am 400 years old.

Every winter, the two koi in our small pond stop feeding when the water temperature reaches the low 40s. Both fish are about a foot long. Zelda is a golden orange, Emmett is white with black markings. They lie side by side in the deepest water near the pump, slowly moving their fins but not responding when I walk close to them.

Along the 40th Parallel, the days now lengthen at the rate of 60 seconds every 160 minutes. Crows and doves and cardinals are up by 6:45 in the morning. At 7:30, there is really a chorus of cardinals and crows and titmice filling the landscape with sound. Along the backroads, flocks of red-winged blackbirds and robins are out in the fields.

Poor Will’s Almanack for the first week of early spring, the twelfth week of the natural year

In my winter moods, nothing is ever what it appears to be be; one thing becomes the sign of another. Like children playing the game of telephone, I dialogue with myself until my thoughts come full circle, transformed into something completely different from the image that began the conversation.