I found my winter companion this evening, or what remains of us all when the life force moves on.

He was what my niece calls a "stink bug," though I don't know his proper appellation or whether he was even really a "he". He snuck into the house sometime during the last warm days of autumn, despite my best efforts to turn his kind back into the wild outdoors. As the days grew short and dark, and as snow settled into the backyard, I would find him scaling the screen on the southwest window. He would disappear for weeks at a time and re-appear on warm, sunny days.

As the days lengthened and lightened, I saw more of him. I would find him in the bathroom, in the hallway, on the stairs. I tried to be mindful of his possible presence as I trod around the place. In the last month or so, I discovered he had lost one of his back legs – a long, jointed, grasshopper-like back leg. But still, he moved about the house and up and down the screen in the southwest window. It may have been a less than ideal situation for him, but he took the bad with the good.

Recently, though, he had been lethargic and seemed frail. Yesterday, I found him on the stairs, working his way down to the front door. Perhaps he was trying to find his way back out, so to pass on from where he had come. I denied him that escape, because I was afraid I would step on him and crush out of him what little life he still had in him. So I carried him back to the southwest window sill and he crawled about as best as he could. I found him walking around on the floor under the window this morning, and it was there that I found him tonight, on his back with his legs folded up.

I was sorry to lose this fellow traveler and will miss him. He was another life in the house, a reminder through all those bleak months of winter of what life pulses through this world in the summer. I was grateful for what his life had meant to me. I thought he deserved a mass, so I put on Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light), a personal favorite, and lit a candle.

I lifted his body and placed it on the window sill, to lie in state where he had spent so many hours of his life with me. His life was a joy to me, his passing a sorrow, and his absence a reminder of how all flesh must go. In paradisum deducant te Angeli, my friend, et aeternam habeas requiem.

Yours truly,
Colby Quid

It is a particular grace to have a bright, sunny day on the Solstice, especially after a rainy and gloomy Solstice Eve. Not only does the brightness of the day make palpable the feeling that the days are growing longer. There is more: the quality of the brightness itself – so soft and gentle – lends assurance that the year has indeed been reborn and that one can trust to hope.

I would not spurn one moment of the mystery of autumn's darkness, but a little soft and gentle light on the beginning of the solar year is a tonic sure to brace one for the challenges of the winter season just beginning. Joy!

Yours truly,
Colby Quid

Jupiter rose around 6 o'clock this evening in The Notch, brilliant in all of its opposition splendor. Tonight we gaze at the largest of our planetary neighbors, the brightest we'll see it for 22 years – until the year 2033.

I could scarcely have asked for a more generous gift from the heavens than this, upon the eighth anniversary of the founding of our humble almanac. More than this I shall not say; there is no rhapsody possible that could hold a candle to this celestial lamp.

Yours truly,
Colby Quid

I found a dragonfly on my dashboard as I got into the car today. Or, rather, I should say: I found its body; the dragonfly itself was gone to where the woodbine twines. It apparently had flown in through the car's open window one sunny afternoon and was unable to find its way back out, throwing itself against the windshield again and again until it at last expired.

I am told that it is Einstein who is credited with the quip that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. In the case of this unfortunate creature, it was not bad wiring, but insufficient wiring, that is responsible for its fatal predicament: Nature graced it with a nervous system, but no brain with which to reason its way out of the car.

It saddens me to contemplate this, but upon reflection, I can't say that it's unfair. Not a one of Nature's creatures is made perfect; we're all just doing the best we can with what we have to work with. That's cold comfort, indeed, but at least we're all in this together.

I inspected my visitor before returning its remains to its natural habitat to complete the cycle of its existence into decomposition. As best as I can tell, trying to match it up with the lists of Maine species on the website of the University of Maine at Farmington, it was a Painted Skimmer (Libellula semifasciata). My specimen looks most like the female.

They're beautiful creatures with their luminescent bodies, iridescent eyes, and shimmering wings. It's hardly a mystery as to why they're called dragonflies, but there's something in me that would rather call this one an "angelfly."

Yours truly,
Colby Quid

I have been remiss.

The biggest annual event in Our Little Town is the Yarmouth Clam Festival, now in its 46th year. It draws some 100,000 revellers from all over the world for races, games, art displays, music, fireworks, and a parade. The Festival is a fundraising event organized by the Yarmouth Chamber of Commerce to support non-profit organizations that benefit the community. Over 35 non-profit groups gather about 3,000 volunteers from around town to prepare food, attend food booths, park cars, keep the grounds clean, and much more.

Until today, we haven't had the Festival's website listed on the Our Little Town page, but consider that oversight corrected!

Yours truly,
Colby Quid

He has eluded my nocturnal habits for almost a month now, that brightness I often espied peeking through the leaves of the trees in the eastern sky around 3 am. Early this morning, my luck changed.

Rising around 2:30, I spotted him right in the clearing over the lane, in the No Constellation's Land between Cetus, Pisces, and Aries – at the tip of the tails of the Fishes and the Whale and just off the nose of the Ram: Jupiter, the king of the gods!

Later this morning, I confirmed the sighting via Your Sky and found in the pages of the Old Farmer's Almanac that the best is yet to come: Jupiter is approaching Earth, with full opposition on October 28 (this almanac's 8th anniversary!), and the closest approach until 2022! Something to look forward to, indeed, but the previews of coming attractions are nonetheless dazzling!

Jupiter will begin rising before midnight in early August; until then, it remains a true night owl's pleasure.

Yours truly,
Colby Quid

Summer began at 1:16 this aternoon, and we turned another corner in the year. But what corner would that be? Where in the life of the year are we?

The Ancients, who had little more to go by than the signs of the waning and waxing of the face of the moon and of life on the Earth, named their calendrical points "Spring begins," "The rains," "Insects awaken," "Grain in the ear," and "Hoar frost appears." They named their moons accordingly: "Great Cold," "Strawberry," "Harvest." They almost to a one began the year in the Spring: on the Equinox, when they finally mastered the cycle of the solar year, but before that, they went by the signs of life closer to the ground. This makes a bit of sense, which we tend to follow to this day in metaphor: the young we speak of as being in the Spring of Life; the period of young adulthood, Summer; maturity, Fall; and old age, death, and perhaps the gestation before another life elsewhere is life's Winter.

But we moderns, using the otherworldly reckoning of the Gregorian Calendar, begin the year in the dead of winter, in the middle of nowhere. The price for this is that our reckoning of time is abstract and out-of-sync with the rhythms of Nature. The standard we use to measure the course of a year is our own conceptualizaion of time, instead of a universe that we can observe and experience for ourselves. Thus, the year is already nearly half gone by the time we reach the Summer Solstice. Our senses tell us that the year is yet in the flush of its youth; our calendars tell us that it's already advanced to middle age.

As any experienced hiker knows, the first stage of knowing where you're going is to start by knowing where you are. This is the hidden wisdom of that old proverb about the journey of a thousand miles beginning with the first step. The exoteric meaning is what anybody can tell you: if you don't get started, you'll never finish up. But the esoteric – and much deeper – meaning is that if you don't have a fix on your starting position, you can't know in which direction your destination lies.

Yours truly,
Colby Quid

Dear Reader,
On this final day of Spring, 2011, we dust off this old Almanac and begin anew. The staff and offices have relocated, since my last Observation in these pages, to a lovely patch of ground in Yarmouth – a little town on the coast of Maine, where the latchstring, so we are told, is always out. I hope you'll enjoy getting to know Our Little Town as well as Our (Former) Fair City of Bangor.

The mornings bring a symphony of psalms in birdsong and the evening closes with a view of Cygnus, The Swan – a celestial serenade of light and my last bird sighting of the day – from the hallway window as I turn in for the night.

There's a whole new world to explore here, inner as well as outer. I have walking staff in hand and always welcome travelling companions. I hear old Bilbo's tune:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can.

Yours truly,
Colby Quid

Canopy has become carpet, a textile of red and yellow and gold. And everywhere one walks under trees, there is no stealth under one's footfalls. In the bushes and brush, the presence of small critters can be known where it cannot be seen. Even the gentlest of rainfall is a veritable drumbeat.

These Tellers of Tales will be gone soon enough: blown adrift in the breeze, ground underfoot or mulched or simply decomposed into the new life of fertilizer, so that their successors will renew the cycle of dancing in boughs, falling to Earth, and making for a few days a bright carpet that whispers the tales of the movements of the animal and meteorological kingdoms. They too will be gone too soon, yet something of them will remain in the Earth. As must we all.

And as I walked to and fro this day on the carpet of life's comings and goings, on the anniversary of the parting from this world of a good and old friend, the haunting lyrics of Johnny Mercer were in my mind: "I miss you most of all, my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall." The life in question had been a good one, and there is little doubt in my mind that it has already precipitated into a promising rebirth in some other world. Thus, it is to those left behind that a little melancholy must remain. Yet, not only melancholy over the absence, but something bright remains. The gift that was that life is a sweetness that is inspired in the memory of it. And thus, the parting of our loved ones is not only a burden that survivors must bear, but a gift that can be treasured.

When the canopy becomes a carpet, I am reminded that it is a life that passes, but it is Life that remains in the fertile soil of the heart.

There are many versions of the song, but the one by Eva Cassidy is dear to me. This YouTube video also has come nice shots of turning leaves.

Yours truly,
Colby Quid