Because I Can’t Stop Drinking in the Light

Fall Week 7

How I linger now in the light! The shadows at day’s end grow long and then longer, and the dry soil throws out motes of dust that catch in the sunset and seem to burst into flame. It is late in coming, but autumn is on fire—sourwood and red maple and poison sumac and witch hazel and oakleaf hydrangea. The red berries of the dogwood trees and the red seedpods of the magnolias flare up, too, and so do the berries of the bush honeysuckle, invasive but beautiful in the failing light.

This is crow light. Light that gleams on glossy black feathers and makes of the crow a breathing shadow, a living, winging, crow-talking god. The light that renders a crow incandescent in the afternoon is the same light that only minutes later tenders the gift of twilight, when colors fade and all the world becomes a crow.

Into this light come the human children, finally home from school and all the obligations that attend childhood in the suburbs: soccer practice and guitar lessons and math tutorials and martial arts and I don’t know what else—it’s impossible to keep track of what suburban parents believe is necessary for a child to learn even after the child has spent all day learning. But the children are home by crow light and free at last to play with one another, setting their own rules and settling their own disputes.

My children were part of an earlier after-school herd that migrated from yard to yard, football giving way to tag as five o’clock became five thirty, too dark to see the ball. Now those boys are men, and even the younger children who followed their trackless ways through the neighborhood are grown. But there will always be new children playing in the last light, and their glad, galloping games and their high, thin voices lift my heart. I try to time my walk to hear them play.

This is the final week for such autumn pleasures, though, for on Sunday the clocks will change again. It will be too dark to play by the time the children get home, and the yards will be empty when Rascal and I take our walk after my own day’s work is done.

Americans live in an age of disputes, so it should come as no surprise when fury erupts over this question of clocks. Even so, I am always surprised when I utter some expression of regret about the coming time change in the presence of someone who, it turns out, prefers her light to arrive before breakfast. You would think I was expressing a preference for strychnine in my coffee. My preferences don’t matter in any case. Except for Arizona and Hawaii, which haven’t adopted daylight saving time and so never sprang forward in the first place, the clocks will fall back an hour on the first Sunday after Halloween, and circadian rhythms will be disrupted across the land.

Wild animals, who have learned our patterns and adjusted their own in response, will try to cross the road at the wrong time of day, and more of them than usual will lose their lives in the confusion. Always, after a time change, even more of my wild neighbors lose their lives.

Human babies will continue to wake before dawn, only now they will wake their bleary-eyed parents a full hour earlier than the day before.

Dogs will demand their supper at the usual hour, and their people will spend the next hour fruitlessly trying to convince them that it is not in fact suppertime.

And I will take my day’s-end walk in the dark, missing the sunset and the sounds of children calling to one another as they play.