An Astonishment of Seasons

What beauty and wonder do we miss because we have names for only four seasons? Writing in the tradition of Margaret Renkl and Terry Tempest Williams, Nina Mukerjee Furstenau ushers us into awe through a year of many tiny seasons.

Humans have long simplified seasons: the Mayans had two, and people in India mark six. With a food writers eye for detail and a poets economy of words, Furstenau takes us on walks out her front door in central Missouri as she moves through a year of seventy-two microseasons. Rooted in an ancient Japanese calendar, An Astonishment of Seasons invites us into rapt attention to the habits of creatures, the cycles of plants, and the fine-spun shifts in weather.

As Furstenau ponders the Midwests many seasons--Morel Mushrooms Rise, Brown Thrashers Sing, Cloudscapes Peak, Mosses Glow--she invites us to find language for the microseasons in the place we live. Awe grows as we sense slight turns in flora and fauna, wind and sky. Short chapters--about a muskrat on a pond, tassels of wheat at summer solstice, a plague of grackles in November--immerse us in a world of teeming abundance. Its a world of grief, too, as parents pass away and the cracks in our tenuous world appear; she mourns the many losses, the diminishments. Yet by holding onto stories about renewal of habitats and species return from the brink of extinction, Furstenau claims, we renew our love for the places we live and for each other.

With twenty-four exquisite illustrations by artist Kate Gray, An Astonishment of Seasons is full of pensive and ultimately hope-filled dispatches from the beating heart of America. Attending to the precise rhythms of nature, we begin to metabolize changes in our own lives--and maybe even become enchanted with the world.

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