One of the few details I remember from Tracy Kidder’s 1981 The Soul of a New Machine is the note that one of the engineers left behind when, frustrated by nanosecond timing issues in the computer they were designing, he simply took off. The note read, “I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”

What a wonderful idea. Problems seem to just naturally appear in dealing with time shorter than a season even when the time in question is much longer than a nanosecond. There is a problem of sorts in simply measuring a season. Something that I must have known but which did not really register with me until recently is that not all seasons are equal. And by seasons, I mean the periods between solstices and equinoxes. A simplified explanation is that Earth moves around the sun in an ellipse rather than a circle and that it travels faster relative to the sun when it is closer to it. I was reminded of this when I tried to calculate the time and date of Imbolc and realized that dividing an exact fourth of a year in half just didn’t work. The actual lengths are approximately 90 days for spring and autumn, 94 days for summer, and 89 days for winter. Yeah, that doesn’t add up to 365 days but throwing in the word “approximately” makes it OK.

When I spoke of calculating the time and date of Imbolc, I meant the point halfway between winter solstice and spring equinox. I suppose I should quit calling it that. Even though Imbolc may have originally been linked to that point, many who celebrate it have more or less attached it to the calendar date February 1. Same thing with Saint Brigid’s Day. Similarly, Candlemas and Groundhog Day have been nailed to February 2 even though they too were once associated more tightly with winter’s midpoint. Of course, even before they were detached from astronomy and attached to calendar dates, these were seen as holidays rather than instants. Back when humans first started recognizing solstices and equinoxes and points halfway between them, they were no doubt happily dealing with no unit of time shorter than a day.

I first wished the world Happy Imbolc in 2016 then repeated it in 2023. Those posts used a photo of a sign at Gobbler’s Knob taken on my only Punxsutawny Phil visit. This time it’s a picture of Howdy Doody and Princess Summerfall Winterspring which I think fits better with all that talk of seasons.

By my calculation, the instant halfway between the most recent winter solstice and the next spring equinox is 10:47 on February 4, 2024. I am not 100% certain that is accurate and I’m not even sure what I should call it if it is. But it’s all I’ve got and, since it is a mere 4 hours and 47 minutes after this blog’s normal weekly posting time of 6:00 AM, I have decided to synchronize this week’s post with that cosmic event.

Happy Winter’s Midpoint! We’ve made it halfway.