These days, as I go back over my November notes from previous years and make new notes about the season, my journal shows me a collection of static impressions, immobile portraits into which I can project myself through memory, reliving those entries, I can understand again what it was like to be witnessing and participating in whatever the diary records.
And I also ruminate on the brain's radial power to pierce decades of linear and circular time and to link and blend and remake natural history as well as personal history.
As I walk the fields and woods this year, the same places I have walked for over 40 years, I realized that my recollection of those places lacks clarity, is melded simply into a vague sense of place. The image of the landscape binds together the years and binds together so many experiences and impressions in racing my age and the passage of time here, in these walks of mine, over old pathways, like in my dreams, the elements of what has happened overlap and overlap again, unnamed, unattached it seems to any particular linear year flickering like sunlight on time and softening the harshness of impending change.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will's Almanack. I'll be back again next week with notes for the fourth week of Late Fall. In the meantime, stand in a familiar place and allowed the past to become present. The present, past.
