And there was light

One of the things I most look forward to each year is the return of daylight saving time.

As those of us who live on the leading edge of the northern end of a time zone know well, it can be pretty darned depressing when it starts getting dark at 4 in the afternoon. Which happens when they call off DST and return to the dreaded standard time in the fall. There’s a reason why the ancients decided to celebrate Christmas in December, that’s for sure. It kinda sorta takes some of the grimness out of the dark. All those lights on the trees on The Common…

Let there be lights! Takes your mind off of the experience of heart of December darkness.

Ah, light.

In these parts, you really start noticing that things are going in a better direction come the middle of February, when you’re out and about after 5 and it’s still – gulp! – a tad bit lightish. Each day, it’s a little lighter a little later. Oh, for joy!

So even though it means “losing” an hour, I’m always delighted when DST rolls back around, and was thrilled when they moved it back to early March from the end of April.

Psychologically, if nothing else, it provides folks around here, always coming off a miserable winter – and no matter how much or how little snow, no matter how much or how little bitter cold, it’s always a miserable winter – a big lift. Promise of spring. Promise of baseball. Promise of warmth. Bring on the forsythia. Enter ye croci: start rearing your charming little purple, white and yellow heads.

Whenever the clocks are moved – forward or backward, matters not – we’re sure to see a couple of articles and/or opinion pieces on the merits of daylight saving time.

Those who hate it claim that it’s terrible for the schoolkids to have to wait for the bus when it’s dark out. They argue that pushing the light to the end of the day doesn’t save us anything energy-wise. In fact, they counter-argue, it’s  a bigger energy waster, as we put our ACs on sooner in the day. Or something.

Anti DST-ers also maintain that it wreaks havoc with sleep patterns. (For crying out loud on this argument. Gaining or losing an hour shouldn’t take all that long to recover from. If someone can’t handle an hour shift, how do they do any travel that cuts across a few time zones? Come on.)  

The pro side – which I am most decidedly on – have a simpler story to tell. Having largely abandoned the energy-saving pitch, we state the obvious: when it’s light later in the day, most of us just feel better. When it’s light out when you get home from work, you’re more apt to go out and take a walk. Or poke around the yard. Or sit on the porch. When it’s pitch black when you get out of your car, you head into the house, slam the door, and hunker down for the night.

There are a couple of proposals that are semi-annually dredged up around DST.

One is that we stay on it all year round. Marco Rubio is a big proponent of this approach, and I’ve got to say I’m down with Lil’ Marco here.

Others want to stay on standard time, saying that moving to DST advantages those selfish hedonists who want light later in the day, and disadvantages the clean-living decent folks (and little school kiddos) who like to get up and at ‘em while it’s light out.

(Funny side story here: My husband had a friend who moved time zones when his kids were still small. When they got their kindergartner out of bed on the first day of school, he looked around and said, “What is this, night school?”)

There are some locals who want New England to go on Atlantic time, and stay on standard Atlantic all year. This, I think, would put us on the same clock as the Canadian Maritime provinces – which might make sense if you live in Maine – but off the same clock as NYC and Washington DC, which makes no sense for those who live in non-Maine.

As a light-at-the-end-of-the-dayer, while I’d prefer to be on the backside of a time zone – which we would be if New England moved to Atlantic Standard – it’s not worth being out of sync with the rest of the eastern seaboard.

So I’m either going with the Marco Rubio plan or sticking with the status quo.

Anyway, yesterday was a pretty miserable day.

I had to get up to work the 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. breakfast shift at St. Francis House, and I really wasn’t quite ready when that alarm went off at 6:15 a.m. (a.k.a., the time of day formerly known as 5:15 a.m.). When I walked across The Common to get to SFH – about 6:45 a.m., it was getting light out – the morning equivalent of twilight.

The weather yesterday was plenty crappy. It snowed a little. It rained a teensie tiny bit. It was grey and dreary. I never really cleared up.

But at 6 p.m., at almost to 7 p.m., even – get this – there was light.

All hail, Daylight Saving Time.