It’s a miraculous thing, what a few extra hours of daylight can do. Last week we finally turned the corner in our saga of wintertime suffering and pushed our clocks ahead. Waking up in the semi-darkness isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I’d gladly take the darker morning that comes with the time change when it means a lighter finish to the end of the day.
Whether it’s summer or winter, by the time that I need to turn on the lights in my apartment, I’m ready to transition to the dinner-making, movie-watching, tripping-the-light-fantastic-portion of my waking hours. I want to switch on the radio and pour myself a glass of wine and generally distance myself from whatever I’ve been working on. In the wintertime, early sunsets mean that I’m ready for the transition beginning at roughly 4:00 pm. I need to force myself to stay productive for another hour or two until I finally give in to temptation and begin chopping onions and preparing myself a dinner. Now that the days are longer, I can last at my desk until nearly 7:00 pm without even noticing. I’m hoping to fill the extra hours with the more soul-satisfying activities of walks along the harbor and eating ice cream cones on the church steps, but for now I’m just happy to be able to enjoy the extra sunshine, even if it is from my desk.
Spring begins officially tomorrow and while the temperatures haven’t exactly risen in New York, there are daffodil shoots coming up in all of neighbors’ yards. I have high hopes that any day now the Bradford pear trees in our neighborhood will begin their springtime spectacle, decking themselves out in white blossoms and preening against the blue sky. Soon enough, I'll get out there with them.