Monday, March 21, 2011

March and the changing of the clocks

It's the first full day of spring. While T. S Eliot wrote "April is the cruelest month", it is March that I find difficult. For me it is the impatient month. There is that tease in the air of spring to come and yet it it still is cold. I find myself longing for color. While I contently watched the slow swelling of the buds over the winter months, I suddenly want them to open and unfurl—now.

My sense of impatience is increased by the early change to daylight savings time. I associate the longer days and evening light with the warm. More than that, I find it unsettling. Over the years, I have adapted to the Celtic calendar and its correspondence to the changing light. I mark February first as the first day of spring and it makes sense to me. The days are appreciably longer—every day a little increase— and the sun is higher in the sky. And now, just as I am smoothly moving along to the steady growth of light, the rhythm of the days has been altered.

When the clocks changed at the end of April, there was almost a sense of release. The sun rose earlier and earlier until it became out of synch with the schedule of the day. I was ready to lose that hour of sleep and readjust. I am not ready and I am out of synch. Everyone is rejoicing and I am complaining. I feel like Scrooge at Christmas. Bah humbug!


PS I need no sympathy. I leave in two days for the British Virgin Islands. It is interesting to contemplate how it would feel to live all the time in a place where the cycle of the year is not marked by the expanding and contracting of the light.

2 comments:

Rachel said...

I too have had a hard time with this early time change. Since it has been proven that DST does not actually save any electicity, I especially disliked the idea that we needed to have even more of this faux time-saving. I really appreciate you describing my own experience of the jolt from it coming at this time in the Celtic calendar. And bon voyage.

Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord said...

Glad to hear I'm not alone Rachel.

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