THANKFUL FRIDAY

For the longest time, I’m talking like for way too long of time, I thought it was “Fall forward and Spring back.” I was a pretend grownup before anyone corrected me on this, that it is actually “Fall back, Spring forward”. Falling forward made perfect sense to me. When people lock their knees while standing, they tend fall flat on their faces, meaning they fall forward. Springs can go whatever direction. Why not backwards? I also come from a line of clumsy people who did and do not fall down stairs as often as they tend to fall up stairs. We trip on the way up a flight of steps, thus falling forward in the process. So you can see that falling forward and springing back in time makes perfect sense.

I have a love/hate relationship with the concept of Daylight Savings. I understand that the whole idea behind it was to align hours of awake time to hours of actual daylight. The thing is, I’m up at 5:15 every morning and after a thirty minute online exercise class, I’m walking the dog a little before 6:00 AM. For a while now, the daylight hours have been nonexistent at these times. In fact it is not until I am back from the walk, showered and headed to work before the sun starts making an appearance. Yes, walking the dog in the dark kind of sucked. Opening the chicken coop while it was still dark was sad because the chickens just stayed in bed, but I’d get home and there would be light. I’d make dinner and there would still be light. I’d do another task and it would still be light. The thing is, I would be motivated to do things when I got home.

This week my motivation has been just to make it home. The end.

Daylight Savings time has never been much of a problem for me, but this year it seems that my body is reacting a little differently. I now wake up at 4:00 AM. I still go to bed at the same time, but I’m losing an hour of sleep. My house is filthy by my standards and every evening I thought I would do one thing to lessen the filth. I have six houseplant pots and only one of them contains a healthy green living plant. All the other planters hold dirt and death and that’s a bit depressing. Every night this week, I’ve told myself to get up and start dumping out the dead. Every night this week, by the time dinner has been made and consumed, I’ve ended up doing nothing. I’m tired. I decided to take the whole day off today so that I could do those things that I’ve been too tired to do while waiting for the new couch to arrive. One of the things on the to do list is to take a nap.

But despite being tired, I have to admit that it has been really lovely watching the sunrise every morning this week while walking Josephine. Our walks start out less dark and end with a spectacular display of light and color. When I walk out to open the chicken coop, I can hear the chickens stirring and then I see them cautiously hop out to greet the new day. I know that with winter comes less and less daylight and I am reminded to soak up as much light as I can now while I can. That means dragging this body out of bed for morning dog walks.

I’m grateful for the light.