Daylight Savings Time

I wrote this the Monday after the end of Daylight Savings Time. Still true.

I woke up this morning at our cabin in Southern Utah on the second day of normal time. I’ve always said I didn’t care which time we were going by— just choose one and stick with it—but this morning revealed a preference.

At the first hint of light this morning I checked the time. Six a.m. Sleep no longer possible, I thought of last night. It had been pitch dark for several hours when we arrived and unloaded the truck. Going to bed immediately felt right and so we did. Eight hours later, fully restored and with a new day ahead of us, I realize THIS, not Daylight Savings Time is how it should remain.

We’ve had some weird experiences with the custom of DST. Once, quite unexpectedly, when we were living in the Philippines, President Marcos declared a change of time. DST would be standard throughout the archipelago country. There was a communication problem, however, and for a number of weeks, few citizens knew about it. In a country where punctuality was not regarded as critical, not much changed. For the community of Americans that we belonged to, it was one more irritation that  added to a growing sense of being driven insane. “What the heck time is it!?!”

In Chile, with our family neatly tucked into two USA time zones, it should have been easy to figure out the time differences between us. And it was—for about three months. When Chilean otoño, or autumn, arrived in March, time went funky on us. We fell backward, our kids sprang forward and what should have been a three hour difference, now became a two, a four, a five hour difference—depending on who was on, who was off and which day—- or whether— they decided to switch times. One year they chose not to go back to Standard Time. If I thought my dysmappia was bad, dystimea made it look like a walk in the park!

Enough! Bring out your world globe. Slice it up into those lovely longitudinal lines; enough for a twenty- four hour day. Stick with Greenwich, England as the starting point. Assign a time to each of the slices. Make Utah 7:24 right now. Proceed forward, not changing a thing. Summer will give you those extra hours you want all by itself. Winter will draw you hearthside without your having to mess with any clocks. Carry on.