Spring ahead (even if it's not spring)

I’m still not accustomed to the earlier date for starting daylight saving time.

Even in this winter-less winter, it feels too early to have sunlight at dinnertime. Daylight saving seems like it should be a precursor to summer, and that made sense when it used to fall in April, once spring was well under way. To have the clocks change before winter has even ended – by the calendar if not by the thermometer – still seems strange to me.

And yet it’s hard not to welcome the extra daylight, and the irrepressible surge of energy it brings. Losing an hour is hard for me; harder than it should be – as I said to my 19-year-old niece yesterday, I keep thinking someday I’ll be an organized and caught-up enough person that one hour really won’t make a difference to me either way, but unfortunately I’m not there yet – but it’s hard to argue with the tradeoff. Seeing sunlight last well into the early evening is inspiring, no matter when it occurs.

So I struggled to get out of bed at seven Sunday morning, intent on starting what felt like a new season with the change of clocks on the right foot rather than letting myself sleep in. The kids both slept late, not having any interest in making an effort to adjust to the new time, and that gave me hours in the morning with which I would have liked to read the Sunday papers but instead completed my 2011 mileage chart to send our tax accountant. Tedious, but necessary; and a decent way to make good use of the morning.

Energized by the sunshine, I tinkered a little bit with making parts of the house look nicer – rearranging knickknacks, putting away paperwork -- and Rick got the the kids to tidy up the playroom while I was out running. By the end of the day, we all felt as if we’d done a touch of spring cleaning.

The sunlight lasted well past dinnertime. Yes, it’s still technically winter, but the clocks have changed and the daylight stretches into the evening now, which to my mind makes it feel more like the onset of spring than any change in temperature could. Longer days are coming, and with them summer. It was a beautiful start to a new season.

One hour, once a year

It doesn’t take young children long at all to figure out the problem with wishing every day could be your birthday: If every day were that special, then no day would be that special.

Concommitantly, it shouldn’t take me long to figure out why it doesn’t make sense to wish every day could be the end of daylight saving time, the day we set our clocks back; yet it’s a wish that sneaks furtively into my mind every year at this time.

I just find that extra hour so phenomenally helpful. The Saturday night before we set our clocks back always feels to me like the one time you can have it all….you can stay up late but still get to bed early. We weren’t doing much this particular weekend; I stayed awake on Saturday reading until 11:00, and yet just before I turned out the light I set the clock back to 10. Sunday morning, I slept as late as I wanted, and yet when I finally arose, it was only 6:20.

Most of the year, I have to make choices: go to sleep early or stay up late and read. Awaken in time to get a head start on the day or bask lazily in bed. In each case, both choices have their advantages….and their drawbacks. But on the first weekend in November, I get both. The best of all worlds. Have my cake and eat it too. Read late but get to bed early. Sleep all I want but still be up before I need to be.

And so I can’t help wishing every year that I could have this day over and over again: one extra hour. But of course, that wouldn’t really help. If each day had one extra hour, I’d fill it, and I’d still get to bed too late or not get enough reading done and not get enough sleep or stay in bed so late it made my whole day feel lazy and unproductive.

So it’s just once a year, that magical extra hour. Like a child contemplating birthdays, I remind myself each year that it’s valuable only because it’s so rare; an extra hour whenever I needed it would cease to be a luxury. Tomorrow, I’ll already be readjusted; that extra hour will have been absorbed into the fabric of the week, and I’ll be once again caught among priorities without ever feeling like I have enough time for all of them.

One extra hour, once a year. It’s a pretty good deal, if you use it well. And it’s a huge treat every time it rolls around.

Fall back (into a whole extra hour)

I’ve never bought a lottery ticket, but on Saturday night I had a feeling that must be what it’s like to win one. Holly and I had gone to Portland on Friday afternoon with my parents and needed to be back for church on Sunday – I was both a greeter and a Sunday school teacher this week – so we had to head home on Saturday night after dinner. I was loathe to leave because we were having such a good time, and I didn’t want to rush a fine dinner of fresh, locally caught cod and roasted potatoes, so it was a little after seven when we headed home.

And, as always, I was already feeling behind on the weekend. I was almost-but-not-entirely ready for the Sunday school class; I knew I hadn’t left things all that tidy at home before we left; I hadn’t gotten as much work done while in Maine as I’d hoped to (yes, it was a weekend, but I was a little backed up with article deadlines and should have at least tried to get some writing done); and I’d been too busy to read the newspaper in two days. Staying in Maine as late as possible felt like the right thing to do while I was there, but heading home I was growing increasingly frazzled.

And then we arrived home – grateful as always for safe travels – and a wonderful thing happened. Even though it was technically 9:30 at night, and therefore not only past time for Holly to be in bed but time for me to start wrapping up my evening as well, Rick had already set the clocks back to mark the end of daylight saving. And just like that, magical as a visit from Cinderella’s fairy godmother, it wasn’t 9:30 at all; it was 8:30.

Which made a colossal difference to me. Nine-thirty is practically bedtime; eight-thirty is still the middle of the productive part of the evening. (If neither of these sounds like a very interesting description of a Saturday night, I should just mention that a night before I have to teach Sunday school is, as far as I’m concerned, really a school night for me: it’s important to me to be well-prepared with a lesson plan, all set with any supplies I need, and ready to wake up early.) Holly was tired and went right to sleep; Tim was reading in bed. I was elated to realize as late as it felt, it suddenly wasn’t really that late at all.

The end of daylight saving always feels like such a gift to me, the one I need more than anything else: the gift of time. I know I shouldn’t live my life in such a way that an hour makes that much difference. To my husband Rick, it doesn’t. He’s a much better planner than I am; he doesn’t budget every last minute toward one thing or another. An hour one way or another doesn’t make all that much difference to him; he’s not that starved for time, and I admire that greatly, but I find it impossible to emulate. An extra hour is huge to me. Even an extra ten minutes can be a big deal most days.

Rick dislikes the day we turn the clocks back because of the sense that early daylight means the end of any hope of warm weather. I love the long sunlight evenings of June and July, but the change in the clock doesn’t really bother me. The early darkness makes the transition from afternoon to evening easier; I know when darkness falls, it’s time to get serious about making dinner and getting the kids thinking about bedtime.

But the best part is definitely that first hour, whether we change the clocks back on Sunday morning like we usually do or Saturday evening like Rick did this year. An hour. A whole extra hour. I wish it could happen more often, but even just once a year, it’s an absolutely wonderful gift.

Home Alone - Six Hours of Solitude

When Rick and I mapped out our plans for last Saturday, it all sounded fine to me: he and Tim had a baseball game, so Holly and I would spend the afternoon with Rick’s family at his sister and brother-in-law’s house, where they would all be celebrating our niece’s fifth birthday.

But when I saw the e-mail from Tim’s coach saying the game had been postponed, my heart leaped with joy. “Now you can take the kids to the party and I can stay home!” I crowed. And that’s how I ended up having a Home Alone afternoon on Saturday, nearly six blissful hours of solitude.

I wasn’t exactly pursuing what I would consider a self-indulgent agenda. Although thoughts of movies, naps, long bike rides, manicures or Starbucks with my laptop flitted briefly through my head, I put myself to work from the moment they left. I cleaned the kitchen, swept the floors, picked up the kids’ rooms and our room, put away everyone’s clean laundry, weeded the flowerbeds and then loaded up the truck with trash and recycling and took a trip to the transfer station. (Thanks to the fact that our monthly visit from our house cleaner is next week, I didn’t feel compelled to start scrubbing bathrooms, which was a lucky break.)

And yet the hours of household labor made the solitude no less blissful. At other times of year, I might not see an afternoon of cleaning and tidying and yard work as such a pleasure, but this summer has been so kid-intensive that just having the silence of an empty house was all the novelty I really needed.

At this stage in my life, I don’t generally suffer from a deficit of time to myself. During the school year, the kids are out of the house six hours a day, and I’m at my desk writing, with plenty of peace and quiet even on the frequent days that Rick works at home. But this summer, time alone has been unusually hard to come by. Both sets of grandparents have been wonderful, as they always are, about taking the kids for visits, excursions or overnights, and both kids get frequent invitations from friends, but generally when one is out, the other is home. One afternoon when my mother took both kids to a movie, I found myself tied up with unplanned work-related phone calls for almost the full three hours. Being with the kids is mostly a pleasure these days, not a chore. But the fact remains that I’ve been getting very little solitude.

So when the door closed behind them, I was as eager and excited to roll up my sleeves and start some intensive housework as I normally am to leave on a vacation or try out a new restaurant. I was just so happy to be by myself. When the kids were preschoolers, I used to sometimes say to them, “I just need two minutes alone with my brain.” Meaning, I just need a little bit of time with no noise clutter, no demands on my attention: just a moment to focus on one thing that isn’t you. Saturday afternoon I felt the same way. Even though what I needed to think about was where to store Tim’s extra baseball pants and how to organize Holly’s many art supplies, that was all I wanted, a little time alone with my brain.

They came home cheerful and tired from the party. No one commented on the work I’d done – not the weed-free flower beds, not the empty recycling bins in the garage, not the fact that the carpet in Holly’s room was visible once again for the first time in weeks – but I didn’t care. I knew the house and grounds had been restored to a state of tidiness, and I’d had five precious hours free of all clamor.

We’re just about halfway through summer vacation; it was a little like the All-Star Break in Major League Baseball, the baseball-free day that every player has just prior to the All-Star Game. Like a baseball player, I ended it feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to play my best game for the second half of the summer.

I love being with my kids, but I love being with my brain too, and sometimes it feels like I can have only one or the other. Gratitude prevailed on Saturday as I basked in the serenity of a kid-free house. It was only a half-day, but I think it’s enough to tide me over until September.

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.