Monday night, I closed the store up alone, and the weather had cooled and there was woodsmoke curling across the parking lot from the neighborhood beyond, and the air was finally what I could sort of describe as “crisp,” and I did something that I do every year right around this time: I bought myself the 2024 edition of The Old Farmer’s Almanac.
I’m not involved in anything you could describe as agriculture, and I’m barely a gardener - in fact, I’m probably the most botanically inept member of my family. But for the past several years running, the Almanac has been an essential for me. Its acquisition and perusal have taken on an almost ritualistic importance.
The Almanac - which has been “useful, with a pleasant degree of humor” since 1792 - scarcely needs introduction (let alone enthusiasm) here in New England, but if you’re not familiar (or are only passingly so), this annual publication provides a detailed calendar, including best planting and harvest times, astrological and astronomical information, weather forecasts, and folk wisdom for the year ahead, all in an instantly-recognizable package.
While I grew up a long way from here, I was introduced to the Almanac early. My dad, who taught horticulture, aquaculture, and turf management in high school vocational programs for thirty years, while moonlighting as a landscape designer on the weekends, has always sworn by it. Like me, he picks his up each year in the fall, and keeps it tucked in the door pocket of the truck next to a pair of vintage Felco shears that will outlive us all. He’s particularly enamored with the weather forecasts, which the Almanac claims have an average accuracy of 80 percent (other sources dispute this, but there you go). He’ll plan trips and projects based on what the little yellow book says. “If it isn’t right,” he’ll shrug, “we’ll always say it should have been.”
I don’t make plans based on the predictions in The Old Farmer’s Almanac - they’re certainly not 80 percent accurate on everything, all the time - but I’ve found that I take a tremendous amount of comfort in flipping through these thin, newsprint pages, looking at and imagining the month, or the week, or the year ahead. In a world that often feels uncertain and overwhelming, it’s grounding to look at October, to read the rhymes and the aphorisms, and see that Venus will be visible in the East, that we ought to watch for Woolly Bear Caterpillars, that right around the 27th, Timber Rattlesnakes will move to their winter dens. That next August might be a rough one for tropical storms. That there are months in between now and then, each with their own challenges and triumphs.
Hell, my phone isn’t always 80 percent accurate. And my phone sure never gave me a line like “fine skies for foliage stroll-iage.”
With my new Almanac, and my 2024 Moleskine Pocket Planner, I’ll soon begin to consider the shape of the seasons ahead. With these two little volumes - call them tools, call them talismans, call them what you will - I’ll start thinking about how to move forward with intention, at a time when it’s hard to predict anything.
If this resonates with you, perhaps it’s time to pick up a copy of The Old Farmer’s Almanac yourself. And of course, if you’d like to know the best days for fishing and planting, or how to measure hail: same deal.
Sam and Emma Kaas own and run the Norwich Bookstore.