Annie Dillard Timeline and Summary

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• Dillard wakes up one winter morning at Tinker Creek and tells a story about a cat she used to have, who clawed her face in the night.
• She goes for a walk along the creek and says she plans to live there for a year, keeping, as Thoreau called it, "a meteorological journal of the mind."
• She thinks about the nature of seeing, and describes a study in which blind people were given sight—they saw the world as fields of color. After reading about this study, she, too, saw fields of color.
• Dillard talks about birds and the way hunters killed or tried to kill them, including an unsuccessful attempt to exterminate starlings in Virginia.
• She begins collecting mantis egg sacs and tying them up in the trees outside her house so she can watch them hatch.
• In early March, she goes on a road trip, where she pets a puppy at a gas station. This leads to a meditation on consciousness and being present (puppies, in case you were wondering, are present).
• April comes, and Dillard's big thing is salamanders. And tulips. And plankton. She starts sampling pond water to look at microscopic creatures.
• In late spring, observing the circulatory system of her goldfish, Dillard contemplates intricacy, and decides God made things unnecessarily complicated (but beautiful).
• Summer comes and she describes a flood that hit Tinker Creek the previous summer.
• As animals—especially bugs—begin to rampantly reproduce, she thinks about the excessive number of each species God allows to exist. She wonders why he would make so many of them, only to allow them to rapidly die off.
• She stalks muskrats and tells us how hard it is. Apparently muskrats are elusive and don't like it when you move.
• After spending the summer observing the wildlife at the creek, Dillard notices that almost all of the insects are missing legs or are otherwise beat up. Again she contemplates the brutality of nature.
• As fall comes, Dillard gets restless and considers heading north as the birds head south; she thinks the Arctic sounds nice. (She doesn't actually go.)
• The winter solstice arrives, marking one year at Tinker Creek. Dillard contemplates two different kinds of ancient Israeli offerings, the wave breast and heave shoulder.
• She decides that God is both cruel and benevolent, and the world is both ugly and beautiful.
• She can live with this. She'll continue exploring and delighting in what she sees.