13 posts tagged with "Almanac"

There is a question that children ask and adults forget to. Why do stars twinkle? It is, on its surface, a simple thing. You look up, you see it: a star pulses, shivers, flickers like a candle flame behind old glass. The planet next to it, however, sits there fat and steady, smugly unperturbed. Same sky, same night, same pair of eyes. And yet one trembles while the other does not.

I have spent forty years watching the sun rise over the Aegean, and in that time I have learned precisely two things with absolute certainty. First: the sun does not care about your alarm clock. Second: neither does your body.

There is a fig tree behind my house. It is old, possibly older than me, though I would not care to confirm either number. Every spring, without fail, it produces its first leaves within the same five-day window. Not a calendar date chosen by committee, not a notification pushed to a screen, not a forecast hedged with probability percentages and a corporate disclaimer. The tree simply knows. It reads the soil temperature, the photoperiod, the accumulated warmth of the preceding weeks, and it acts. It has done this, I suspect, since before Nikolas Faros was born, and it will continue long after his teleprompter falls silent.