natureequinoxfield notes
Six noticings on the week of the equinox
The year tips over its balance point tomorrow morning, and the edge of town has been keeping notes for a fortnight already.
Tomorrow, at about five past eight in the morning by our clocks, the sun crosses the line it crosses twice a year, and day and night come as close to even as they get. I am not sentimental about the equinox. It is a matter of geometry. But the wildlife on the scrap of ground I watch does not read geometry, and it has been telling me the season has turned for two weeks already. Here is what I have written down.
The swifts have gone. I did not see them leave. That is the way of it every year: one evening the sky is full of them screaming over the rooftops, and the next it simply is not, and you stand there feeling slow for having missed the exact night it happened.
The spiders have taken the stairwell. Every morning this week there is a new web across the back steps at face height, rebuilt by dawn no matter how many times I walk through it. This is not the spiders arriving. It is the spiders finally grown large enough to notice.
The light has gone long and low by four in the afternoon, and it comes in under the awnings now instead of straight down. Everything it touches looks briefly important. A parked van at this hour could be a monument.
The verge nobody mows has gone to seed and is loud with finches working it over. Leave a thing alone for one summer and it will feed something by autumn. I have built a small career out of that single sentence.
Leave a thing alone for one summer and it will feed something by autumn.
The drain that turned into a stream after the rains has frogs in it again, which it should not, strictly, and which nobody planned, and which is the most cheerful unlicensed thing I know of within a mile of here.
And the morning light is cold now in a way it was not in August. Not cold like a number on a thermometer. Cold like a hint. The animals carry their own instruments, and their instruments are more honest than mine, and every one of them says the same thing this week, which is: get ready. The date on the calendar is only the part we wrote down afterwards. The birds filed their report a fortnight ago and did not wait for us to confirm it.
More from the journal
More by Brynn Halloway
- Field notes from the edge of town 19 Sep 2026
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- Sign how you like, but be one person. You may use the name on your account, a name of your own choosing, or none at all. What you may not do is wear somebody else's: no pen name of ours, no member's name but your own, and nothing that reads as the studio or its staff.
- Argue with the point, not the person. Robust disagreement is welcome; contempt is not.
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What a chosen name is and is not
A chosen name hides you from the room, not from us. Every remark stays linked to the account that wrote it, and the studio can see that link whenever it needs to. Please treat it as a way to speak freely, not as a way to say something you would not put your name to.
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