When the Almanac Sat on the Counter

I heard the news and my first reaction wasn’t rational.

They’re not making the Farmer’s Almanac anymore.

My brain immediately went to the wrong place. I thought of the old yellow book. The one that feels like it has always existed and always would. The kind of thing you assume survives wars, recessions, and bad decades just by inertia. Two hundred years of showing up every year without anyone asking if it was still relevant. I remember thinking that can’t be right. That’s not how those things end.

So I did what a lot of people probably did. I went and bought one.

Only later did I realize I didn’t need to. It turns out the publication that’s ending isn’t the one most people picture. There are two long running almanacs with nearly identical names, and the headline didn’t bother to slow down and explain the difference. One is ending after more than two centuries. The other, the yellow one most of us think of, is still going strong.

That distinction matters. And it also kind of doesn’t.

Because by the time I realized I’d mixed them up, the reaction had already happened. The feeling wasn’t about accuracy. It was about continuity. The confusion didn’t cheapen the moment. It explained it.

It made me stop and think.

My earliest memory of a Farmer’s Almanac has nothing to do with forecasts or moon cycles or planting charts. It’s about where it lived.

My grandmother always had one on the kitchen counter, right next to the telephone. The landline. The phone book. Her handwritten list of numbers. Friends. Family. People she actually knew. Sometimes it migrated to the dining room table and got buried under mail and whatever else was happening that week. It wasn’t treated like a sacred object. It was just there. Like it belonged.

My grandmother grew up poor in West Virginia. Coal country. Depression era. Eight kids. My grandfather died of black lung. She moved the family to Michigan so she could work the line at General Motors and keep everyone fed. That wasn’t heroic. It was necessary.

She was frugal in a way that didn’t feel ideological. Tin foil got saved. Plastic bags got washed. If something still worked, you didn’t throw it away. Waste wasn’t immoral. It was careless. Effort mattered too much for that.

She had a massive garden. Not a decorative one. Not a lifestyle hobby. A real garden that produced food.

Seasons mattered in her house. You didn’t plant because the weather felt nice. It was too early for that. You wait another week. Apples weren’t something you bought whenever you felt like it. Apple season meant driving out to an orchard, walking the rows, learning which apples were worth picking and which weren’t, then coming home and spending days peeling, cutting, and canning.

Beans. Corn. Strawberries. Cherries. It wasn’t charming. It was work. And no one congratulated you for it. That was just how you ate.

I don’t remember her ever saying “according to the almanac.” She probably didn’t need to. That knowledge was already baked into her through repetition and paying attention. But the book was always there. Quiet. Present. A reminder that the year had rules and you couldn’t negotiate with them.

When I was a kid, I rode my bike everywhere.

Fourteen miles to my grandmother’s house. Regularly. Through suburbs. Through city streets. No phone. No tracker. No one checking in. You just went.

That was how you found people. You rode around until you saw where all the bikes were dumped on a front lawn. Trails weren’t curated paths with signs. They were dirt lines cut through whatever patch of woods hadn’t been bulldozed yet. Forts by creeks were real. Riding twenty miles in a day wasn’t impressive. It was normal.

A lot of my bikes were built from garbage picked parts. Old frames. Bent rims. Someone else’s trash. We weren’t destitute, but we weren’t well off either. You learned to make things work. You learned how to fix what broke because replacing it wasn’t always an option.

At the time, none of this felt like freedom. It just felt normal.

I wasn’t better for growing up this way. Just shaped by it.

Looking back, it’s obvious how analog that childhood was. Left to our own devices in the literal sense. No one knew where you were, and that was fine. You paid attention because you had to. If you didn’t, things went wrong.

Years later, I bought my own Farmer’s Almanac.

Not out of sentiment. Curiosity. It showed up on lists of things you should have if you wanted to be prepared. I’ve never been a good doomsday prepper, but preparedness doesn’t strike me as crazy. There’s a wide gap between planning for the end of the world and not wanting to be helpless when systems hiccup.

I didn’t get much out of it.

By then, the internet could tell me exactly when to plant tomatoes based on my address. Weather forecasts were hyper specific. Growing seasons were searchable. The almanac felt outdated. I didn’t put the time into learning how to really use it, and even if I had, I’m not sure it would have changed my day to day life.

Still, I kept it.

The first garden I ever had wasn’t a hobby. It was survival.

I was unemployed. Money barely covered rent and utilities. Heat was a concern. I grew vegetables on my balcony in containers and buckets. I lived on frozen chicken breasts and whatever came out of those plants.

That garden worked.

It probably worked better than the later ones because it had to. I had time. I had a reason. Later gardens were in the ground. No dig beds. Cardboard. Good intentions. Then squirrels, aphids, lack of time, and a life where groceries weren’t an immediate problem. The effort stopped matching the return.

Now things feel different again.

Inflation is real. Jobs feel fragile. I work in a creative field where artificial intelligence is already replacing people. Layoffs are constant. I’m not starving, but uncertainty has weight. You feel it even when things are technically fine.

I think about gardening again. Containers. Buckets. Something manageable. Not to save the world. Not to pretend I’m self sufficient. Just to rebuild a relationship with seasons that doesn’t depend entirely on a screen telling me what’s about to happen.

So when I heard that the Farmer’s Almanac was ending, even though it wasn’t the one I thought, it landed heavier than it should have.

I don’t need an almanac. I’m not sure I ever really did. But its importance shouldn’t be dismissed.

It represents a kind of attention we’ve slowly given up. Not knowledge. Attention.

The almanac assumed you were watching the year. That you noticed patterns. That you understood timing mattered. That not everything was instant or negotiable.

We traded that for precision and convenience, and I’m not pretending that was a mistake. I use the tools. I benefit from them. I’m not interested in romanticizing hardship or pretending the past was better.

But I do wonder what happens when we stop practicing anticipation altogether. When seasons become something we react to instead of something we read.

I don’t know where this goes. I don’t know what replaces that ritual in a way that doesn’t feel forced or fake. I just know that a sloppy headline about a book I barely used made me think about my grandmother’s kitchen, my bike leaning against a fence fourteen miles from home, and a kind of quiet competence that used to be normal.

Maybe that’s the real loss.

Not the book.

The habit of paying attention before the year reminds you who’s actually in charge.