On Sunday, March disappears

 The onset of Daylight Relocating Time this Sunday, March 8, will make the month effectively vanish. The sunrise moves back to January. The afternoon becomes April. Day length doesn't change, but our emotional relationship to it will. I'm not complaining, just observing. Plenty of other people will be complaining bitterly, as they do every year.

When the clocks shifted in April or May, day length was already more then twelve hours. You might notice the shift in light, but it wasn't as dramatic. Moving the clocks was a shortcut way to align the daylight with the kinds of schedules we had forced ourselves into by adopting the industrial way of life. Again, not complaining. Industrialization has a lot of problems that have only been corrected agonizingly slowly because they benefit the owner class, but modern life has a lot of advantages for ordinary citizens as well. As it relates to measured time, we try to live our lives in the spaces left to us by the virtuous culture of work work work, and longer evening light seems to suit that.

When the Bush (43) administration moved the start from April to March in 2007, the dislocation was obvious. Living in a northern state, working in a tourist business, I had to deal with the sudden shift to a long afternoon when our business hours had not changed. Customers who would have gotten the hint from the onset of twilight suddenly felt like they were in late afternoon instead of early evening. They hung around inconveniently as we tried to do all of the things that had to wait until after closing when they formerly had not been under foot. Run along now! Go find a happy hour somewhere.

We no longer operate that branch, so that part is less of a factor. It's been almost two decades now. I've come to like it, while still studying its weird effects. Like everything else that humans do, it has its good points and bad points. The erasure of March is merely interesting. Nature still uses March as it always has.

The weather this year seems to favor the illusion of April. It's warmer than average for the first ten days or so. Maybe longer, but you can't really trust a long range forecast. Too many butterflies can flap their wings before a storm projected for two weeks away actually materializes. The same goes for a warm spell with sunny skies. Here in New Hampshire -- and northern New England in general -- we know that we will be punished for any premature taste of spring weather. We just don't know how soon and how much. Frigid blast? Devastating dump of heavy snow? 

You're not through with winter until winter is through with you.