sure. wait. what?

THE CLOCK sprang forward last Sunday. It skipped an hour, so Sunday went straight to 1 AM as if 12 midnight didn’t exist.

It wasn’t a fluke. Around here, it’s called Daylight Saving Time. It happens twice a year, once in the fall and once during springtime. After each temporal adjustment, early mornings grow dark again to make way for brighter evenings. It means, among other things, that I get to go home from work while the sun is still a couple hours away from hiding.

It lifts my mood, I must admit. I like coming home to a bright house. I like spring. The sky still barfs out snow every now and then, and murky brown water gathers on the sidewalks — but these are mere indicators that the city is shifting towards something better. Greener trees, more light, all that. I like it.

Anyway, I hope my DST-induced optimism rubs off on you somehow, especially with all the bad news going on. Also, here, a poem for a little solace:

Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

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The featured image is an oil painting by Franz von Stuck called “Sounds of Spring” (1910).