Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Place Entry #5

Written March 11, 2012:

Daylight Savings Time, and the sun sets in a way that it hasn’t in months, though really it has, only at a different clock signature than yesterday.

We are tricked by daylight. In tiny reserves of confusion, we allow ourselves to think the world has changed. It hasn’t changed a bit, and neither has the yard despite another upheaval of a quick snow, a thick rain and tricks of perception.

The need to adjust our clocks twice a year appears more like folly than common sense, an example of humanity’s flawed thinking. Must we fix everything? Must we right the tiniest idiosyncratic miscalculation of our ways? Earth did not hand us a calendar; we created a logic to fit the random beauty of nature into something we could understand. We are so naive.

I stand along the fence, steel-clasped and its surface absent a winter chill. Steel is as reliable an indicator of temperature as either Fahrenheit or Kelvin’s scales. It is unseasonably warm today, enough to render that term meaningless; not hot but tepid upon the steel posts I installed five years ago to pen up three dogs. They have room to run, to wrestle, to rest. Two of them are gone now – one buried..,or, destroyed...to some place I shudder to consider the Humane Society might have taken him; the other adopted out to a farm. Both were rescues. Now, we own two dogs again – one our aging beagle mocked within these pages before; the other a new puppy all of a dozen weeks old, a scrappy brown lab with hints of collie and shepherd.

The warmth of a post-clock-changing day is disconcerting; as if the power of Timex brought forth heat from the east. It hasn’t been this warm in March at any time that I can recall before. The air is dense with oven-fresh warmth, the sun’s rays sharp, the steel posts comfortable to the touch. All human constructs are longing for early spring and refuse that other manmade chronicle, the calendar. Leap Day came this year; another folly, another passage of time forced upon us by ourselves and our infantile comprehension of the Earth.

Science can claim rotations away in calibrated twirls and spins, but something larger suggests that maybe that extra four-quarters of a day (perceived) has it purpose. Did we ever stop to consider that the leftover portion of day, like all of the world’s natural phenomena, was meant to be? That maybe we need to think further to figure out why the Earth revolves the way it does? Instead, we build a clock and a system and a concept to refute the natural order. It’s how we are.

The puppy snips at an eager branch, the stud of a bush desiring to awaken early from winter. The yard is scattered with moments of prematurity; patches of grass green-rich like a Notre Dame tee-shirt; springs of poison ivy tormenting like a bully in pre-emptive threat; tufts of something steel-wool-like that could be my cut hair blown into a corner from last summer or could be a sort of mold ready to disappear from winter’s wet, raggy ways; a yellow buttercup leaf budding on vines that twist and maze through the hillside. All signs of spring are present too soon.

A haunting feeling settles in. This isn’t right; this time, this sunset, this season, this longer day; this warmth. The world continues to surprise me. In forty-two winter thaws I have come to expect certain things. Heavy snow melt, slowly increasing warmth, piles of dog dirt to wade through and dispose of, leaves left to rot and decompose into free fertilizer. This winter has been mild and as such the snow was gone weeks ago and I already scooped the yard four times. It is different. Even the date on which we adjust the stupid clocks was changed a few years ago by a benevolent officer of some benevolent agency of the benevolent govern...well you get the picture.

Today, I let the puppy play with the dog longer than most post-dinner outings. I don’t need to return inside yet. Despite having “lost an hour of sleep,” it will be bright after seven o’clock, and that means more time outside. It is embarrassing to think we can channel time and space, yet I know tomorrow will seem to come quicker: back to work, back to the whim of Clock. But the sun’s heat pulses over me as I observe the yard. The tranquility is as silent as the motionless sway of the kids’ still-winter-dormant swing. It has no interest in springing forth early to play; then again, it isn’t alive. I am alive, and the sun is alive in its relative way. Over the next few weeks the yard will come to life with birds, caterpillars, chipmunks, sloths, dandelions, and the ivy will look on with envy, waiting to wreak havoc matched by the puppy on the stick that doesn’t have a chance. The puppy is alive, our last one dead; I am alive, the clock has never lived.