Kathy Hughes
It’s October, meaning we’re going to turn the clocks back, marking our plummet into the dark months of winter. It will be dark in the morning, dark in the evening — dark at supper time. Part of me loves the mystery of it — the dominance of night over day, long frosty nights, almost brightly lit by moon and stars. But then there are the other accompaniments as we transition into winter.
Who knows what climate change will bring, but typically November (like March) is a long, gray, miserable month — cold, wet and overcast for 31 days. We usually get our first snow in this eleventh month, and suddenly everyone forgets how to drive: “The snow won’t slow me down, I have 4-wheel drive, so I can go seventy-five miles an hour on Route 690.” These are the drivers of cars that keep the tow trucks busy, pulling vehicles out of the ditch.
Turning the clocks back seems to put nature into low gear, we’re hobbled by boots, hats, scarves and gloves. Many people would miss the snow if we didn’t get any, but there’s no sense in being choosy — what happens, happens, regardless.
For certain the only thing we have complete control over is the clocks. We can turn them forward and back, or leave them alone — it’s our choice. Time as we measure it is imprecise — our sundial time would make communication, transportation and any sort of scheduling completely chaotic. So it’s up to society to synchronize our clocks to the best advantage.
The European Union proposes to implement “standard” time, but does that mean keeping daylight savings time, or reverting to the previous standard? If you were to choose, which would you prefer?
I for one would opt to keep daylight savings time permanently, all year around. In the winter, it’s dark anyway when most people get up, and having a little dusk in the evening would certainly improve my mood. When it is still light, I am more likely to have the energy to do a quick errand. But when it’s dark? It’s straight home, dinner then to bed.
I would remind the purists that the time we keep is only an approximation, depending on our location within the time zone. As the dairymen say, the cows know only when it’s time to milk, regardless of what the clock says; changing the clocks makes it harder for the farmer to live a life in sync with their neighbors and their community.
In the European Union, probably in Alaska and Canada, too, the North Atlantic countries lie high in the Northern Latitudes, where changing the clocks makes little sense. There, for the most part, it’s either dark most of the time, or light most of the time, depending on the season. Perhaps someday people will say, “remember when we turned the clocks forward and back? How quaint — I wonder what that was all about?”
