End of daylight saving time

The end of daylight saving time receives a mixed welcome in our household.

My husband Rick considers the day in April when we turn the clocks ahead to be the best day of the year. He loves the extra daylight after dinner. For him, it means the start of warm sunlit evenings at the baseball field, even though we often have chilly weather and plenty of rain right into early May and beyond. So he scowls every year when I remind him about turning the clocks back. He sees no advantage to early nightfall.

Tim doesn’t like the end of daylight saving time either, although he won’t (or can’t) articulate it the way Rick does. For years, Rick and I have suspected that Tim suffers from a mild form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. His reaction to the diminishing daylight is that strong. Every year, as the dusky late afternoons arrive, he seems to melt into the arm of the playroom couch as if becoming invisible, pale as the couch’s grayish-white upholstery. The onset of winter incites crankiness and a morose bearing in Tim. One reason I coaxed him to try running daily with me three years ago was to see if we could offset the response he had annually to the dwindling sunlight. It didn’t help much in that regard, though. It’s still early this year to judge his response to turning the clocks back, but so far I don’t notice as much of a setback as usual. Maybe he’s starting to outgrow his sunlight-dependent mood swings.

I fall toward, though not all the way at, the other end of the spectrum from Rick and Tim when it comes to the end of daylight saving time. True, the late-autumn and early-winter nights can seem very dark around here. But I also find something helpful in the early darkness: it seems to cue us into early-evening mode a little earlier and a little more naturally. When the daylight lasts well into the evening, it’s always harder to ramp down at the end of the day: hard to make fast rules about bedtime or quiet time when the sun is still high in the sky at eight o’clock.

In the fall, we have the opposite effect. Seeing the daylight start to fade at 4:30
reminds me that it’s time for homework and dinner preparation. Yesterday, though Tim complained briefly about the early sunset, it worked out well for us; from about 4:30until dinner, Holly played school and Tim did his homework while I thought about what to make for dinner. At other times of year, although Holly would probably still be playing school at that hour (other kids come home from second grade and tell their parents about their day; Holly reenacts the whole thing in a fictional version, and in real time), Tim would likely be at a baseball practice and I’d be having trouble focusing on end-of-day responsibilities as well.

The extra daylight in the early morning helps me, too, though I know it won’t last long. For weeks, I’d been getting up in total darkness at 5:45 AM, turning on the outside lights to let the dog out, turning on Tim’s bedside lamp at 7 to wake him up for school. Now it’s already starting to brighten outside when I get up before 6, and the kids don’t need extra cues to know it’s time to get up when I go to wake them; they can see the broad daylight.

Of course, the best part of the end of daylight saving time is the extra hour. I treasure that, and this year more than ever before because it was found-time in its purest form this time around. All day Saturday, with the excitement of Halloween, I forgot about turning the clocks back. Not until I crawled under the covers at 11 PM on Saturday night did I remember about resetting the clocks. And by then it was too late to get out of bed. If I’d remembered a half-hour earlier, at 10:30, I would have said “Oh good, it’s only nine-thirty” and squandered the extra hour on Twitter or folding laundry, not using it for extra sleep at all, which was what I most needed this weekend. Because I forgot about it until I was in bed, sleep was the only way to use it.

So I started the post-daylight saving season this year with an extra hour of much-needed sleep. Rick is dealing with it, and Tim hasn’t gone into too much of a seasonal slump yet. Holly doesn’t notice daylight saving time either way; she carries her sunshine internally and doesn’t seem to have much of a relationship with the natural world. So come five o’clock, we’ll turn on the lights, start making dinner and hunker down together like hibernating bears, ready for cold weather and the approaching winter with its long, dark nights, and us cozy and warm in our well-lit home.