At five o’clock this evening, I had stepped out of Aldi’s to wait for the bus to take me to campus, and then I looked up into the sky. Actually, I didn’t have to look up into the sky because everywhere around me already showed what had given me the kind of unexpected dread: it was very dark. It was not just an evening dark, but a pitch black appearance of night. I looked at my watch, and it was still five o’clock. For a moment, I thought that my watch had stopped, I had missed the bus, and I was stranded again in town, especially since everyone seemed to observe me with some kind of suppressed amusement as I stood at the bus stop. Actually, they were not looking at me. I have now classed it with the same standard response of momentary notice that I get every time I find myself standing in a public place, especially alone, and carrying two bags of groceries.
The point of this post however is to lament this strange darkening which I have heard about and have come to expect as a consequence of the new season of shorter daylight. I have not however been able to wrap my head around it. Whenever day begins to start one hour late, and nightfall then begins at five in the evening, it comes with a certain nervousness for which I’m not prepared. Oh, where is the comforting bosom?
At two am on Sunday November 1st, time changed in America and everyone shifted their clocks an hour backwards, to deal with the late daylight that has 7ams looking like 6ams. Since about a week and half, I’d been noticing the fact that the day still looked very dark by 7am, and it always stayed dark until about half an hour later, so it was much of a relief to finally adjust with everybody else, and be able to get one more hour of sleep. For a change, I was also able to use the daylight saving switch button on my Nokia phone. Up until now, the function never meant anything to me other than “another American thing”. In Nigeria, we never had to change our clocks during particular seasons even though this same changes occur twice a year when the day gets shorter and the night gets longer. We didn’t change our clocks. We just adjusted ourselves to it. The changing the time part of the ritual here – I guess – is to make it “official” and generally uniform. It would be weird to get out at seven o’clock in the morning and never be able to find one’s way around because it’s still dark. But I can’t stop wondering: does Daylight Savings apply to the people of Alaska, the land of the midnight sun as well?
Here are photos from the Fall season, or Autumn, as it’s called in Europe. In Nigeria, it’s simply called the Harmattan season, even though it doesn’t start in many parts of Nigeria until later in November.