Observations in Oddity 3/19/2023

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

The time change has proven very strange for me this season.  I suppose, if you get right down to it the entire idea is a tad on the strange side. Most people I know are not fans of falling back or springing forward timewise, but I digress. I have heard changing our clocks described as cutting the end off of a blanket, sewing the cut off part on the opposite end and calling it a longer blanket. Looking at it that way, strange is a very generous description I suppose. But I haven’t come here to cite the ridiculousness of moving clocks.  I just wanted to talk a bit about, well, I don’t know that I have a single theme in mind.  Maybe today I just write about what comes to mind. If I can manage to string that into some coherent something, then we’ll call this a successful blog. If I cannot accomplish making much sense then, perhaps you can pretend that we’re just friends having a chat and the topic of conversation is random.  Can we try that this week?  Now, I may manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat and actually say something worth saying but there is the chance that such won’t be the case, so I am attempting to prepare you for that possibility, covering my bases so to speak.

I talked about how the time change was strange. It all started Sunday morning.  Though I was losing an hour of sleep by participating in the asinine procedure of calling the time by a different name, I still for some unknown reason woke up exceptionally early.  I also, unfortunately, woke my husband up in my rousing and we both had the inability to go back to sleep. Unlike me, he went ahead and got up attempting to be productive as he does in the early morning. While his ambition prods him to get out of bed and begin to get things done, I tend to land at the other end of the spectrum. I want to stay still and hope that I can slip back into a slumber.  I suppose my course of action stems from laziness if I’m being honest. It’s alright though. I am willing to admit my lazy streak. However, despite my best efforts, sleep would not return. Which is annoying in and of itself but to know that I lost an hour of sleep already only makes it that much more so.

Once I begrudgingly got up and began my day is when I noticed how thick the darkness was. I don’t know what exactly I was expecting but the blackness outside was so thick that I can’t describe it any other way to say it almost felt as though something was wrong. The best way I can make that statement make sense is to describe it by telling you that I normally sleep with some sort of noise and when the power goes out the silence actually wakes me up. It isn’t some loud sound that you would think would disturb sleep it is the sudden disconcerting amount of silence that it so noticeable.  I hope that paints the picture or sets the sound, as the case may be.  The abject lack of light felt like something had gone very important had been turned off or unplugged.

That Sunday morning when I opened the back door, it was just black. It was thick and it seemed that the sun had lost track of time and was late for dawn.  The old saying that it’s darkest before the dawn was seemingly alarmingly accurate that morning.  But while the darkness had seemingly enveloped all of the outdoors and it, for lack of a better term, felt like it should be silent, it wasn’t. It was downright strange.  In the pitch the birds were in full swing. They had apparently heard a rumor that spring was on its way and they were making the announcement loudly and proudly.  It didn’t seem like the whole of nature’s symphony should be exploding without the slightest speck of light.  It just felt so inappropriate.  Birdsong is, in my mind at least, associated with sunshine so my brain was having a very hard time with what I was experiencing.  It almost made the darkness seem deeper since it was vast enough to have countless songs emanating from all corners of it.

Yes, I do realize that I have gone on and on about not very much.  I’ve rambled about just a brief insignificant moment over the course of multiple paragraphs.  I will call that enough now and try to see if I can find some sort of justification for you having just read me waffling on. I guess it was just observations of the oddity of the time changing and songs in silence.  I suppose it really just shows though that no matter what we call ourselves accomplishing by changing times in hopes of being more industrious and productive (or whatever we truly were trying to accomplish by daylight savings time) that the seasons will continue to come and go. The birds will continue to herald the coming of Spring.  And despite the overwhelmingness of the shadow, light will eventually break through. Hm. Look at that. Something worth saying produced itself after all.  Wonders never cease.