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.