The days are getting longer
The light, the dark and the tides.
Today marks the beginning of Daylight Saving Time, which should be a holiday.
It is one of the greatest days of the year, particularly if you live in a state like Minnesota. We’ve endured the cold. We were hardly surprised a few days ago when a small snow forecast grew to roughly a foot of actual snow, our first real storm of the season.
But most of all we have endured the dark. Those December, January and February days, particularly the bleakest overcast ones, where light was a rumor and anything we were given was gone by half-past four.
Just when you were done with the (work)day, the day was done with you. We hibernated or made the best of it.
Now the script gets flipped. In Minnesota, we’ve already been gaining light at a rapid clip. But Sunday, we can step outside at 7 p.m. and it will still be light outside.
The possibilities will grow along with our shadows. A trip to the playground after school? Plenty of time for that. Take a family walk with the dog before or after dinner? Sure.
There is an ease of movement and simplification of living that happens as the light grows.
Selfishly, the return of light and spring, then summer, tends to restore me to a fuller health. My brand of multiple sclerosis has always been one that suffers in the cold and darkness, and getting to the finish line of this particular winter has been a challenge.
So if you see me outside on an outlandishly nice day next week, running around without a shirt on, just act naturally.
I’ll just be celebrating what should be a holiday in my own way.
The days are getting longer.
Regardless of how you voted in November, I think almost all of us would be willing to acknowledge that the pace of news since Donald Trump was inaugurated — checks notes: 48 days, or slightly less than seven weeks ago, no this can’t be right, yes it is — has been frenetic.
That is the point, it has been argued on both sides, but that doesn’t change the reality that a never-ending news cycle makes every day feel impossibly long.
Log on at 2 p.m. and you might read about a new tariff; log on later, and you might read that it isn’t happening any more.
Working hard to wind up in the same place doesn’t sound to efficient to me (nor to some of the billionaire class, it seems), but that’s not my unofficial department.
It’s not exhausting. That’s too dramatic. But it is fatiguing to live so many of these long days, one after the other.
The term news fatigue sounds entirely too precious, like we can’t be bothered to pay attention and would rather just sink en masse into distractions, but it is real.
That said, we need to give as much attention as we can afford. The days aren’t going to get shorter anytime soon.
The days are getting longer.
The moon is the culprit.
Because the moon is creeping slightly further away from Earth — by about 1.5 inches each year, I sure hope it wasn’t something we said — every day is a tiny fraction of a second longer than the one that preceded it.
I came upon this fact in my 5-year-old son’s favorite “Weird But True Facts” book, so I’m hardly the expert on why this is the case.
But here is the explanation, per a 2023 piece at BBC.com:
“It's all about tides," says David Waltham, a professor of geophysics at Royal Holloway, University of London, who studies the relationship between the Moon and the Earth. "The tidal drag on the Earth slows its rotation down and the Moon gains that energy as angular momentum."
Our days only get about a millisecond longer over the course of every century, which seems like no big deal. But add it up over 4.5 billion years, the approximate age of Earth, and it amounts to about half a current day.
Per that same article, Earth used to have two sunrises and two sunsets every day, even though days on this planet were only 13 hours long.
Thinking about a past that distant reveals an impossible truth, something a lot of us can barely reckon with even if we don’t dispute the science.
Thinking about what this means for the distant future, a time on Earth with 30 or even 36 hours in a day, is equally inconceivable even though that’s where things are heading.
Will we eat five meals a day? Sleep 12 hours? Finally take up all those hobbies? Get out in the sun even more?
Or maybe just scroll aimlessly even longer while trying to avoid the news of an impossibly long day.
It’s time for our paid subscriber spotlight feature. This month it’s Rebecca Slater, an excellent local photographer who has taken pictures of the Rand family multiple times. You can find samples and contact information at her web site. Here is Rebecca describing her work:
I’m a photographer specializing in higher education and non-profit work, capturing the heart of academic institutions and organizations through powerful imagery. Whether it’s vibrant campus events or portraits that reflect an institution’s mission, my goal is to create photos that inspire and tell meaningful stories. While my primary focus is on these environments, I also love photographing families, preserving the genuine connections and emotions between loved ones.
Also, I created a Google form to sign up for the first meeting of The Friscalating Dusklight Book Club. The date is still TBA, but the book is not. As I’ve mentioned a couple times, first up is “The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told,” as featured on a recent TFD podcast. Here is the direct link to buy it from Stanford University Press … or the Amazon link … or the Thriftbooks link.
I'm enjoying more daylight - and the warmth, but there is something about those cold months that force (me to) slowdown.
Thanks for the feature!