et ego in Circadia vixisti

Chimneys blotch the thinly snowed-over roofs. I woke at five, automatically calculating, before I was sure I'd read the clock properly, “it's really four, right? Spring forward. Right.”

And Martha woke too, and I read to her for a while – near the end of the Lord of the Rings, the scouring of the Shire – till she fell asleep again. Still no sleep in me, not then, so I slipped out the bed and out of the room. And now the vanished sleep has come back, making my eyes swollen and irritated: but now I don't want it, lest my circadian rhythms get even more confused. There are many things I need to do today: but nothing I look forward too.

Eventually the morning came, and I opened the blinds, and saw that the world was dusted with snow. A gull passes the window, now, calling its complaints. Over in the east, between the houses, is a brightness, where the cloud cover thins, but mostly the sky is dull gray, the same cold color as the snow. A wind stirs the fir boughs in my neighbor's yard, and shakes a little snow loose. Most is already gone.

A crow comes to rest on the on the telephone wire, his legs spraddled, Western fashion. The wind is moving the wire so much that he has to flirt his tail continually to stay aboard: he tires of that and launches again: a black scrap blown suddenly upwards, out of view, over the house.

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I really don't care how you number the hours of the day, but skipping them back and forward twice a year, playing the devil with circadian rhythms and disrupting whatever delicate balance people with sleep disorders have achieved, is deep-dyed nonsense. But it did allow me to post this joke on Facebook on Sunday morning, which almost made it worth it: et ego in Circadia vixisti, I wrote. "I, even I, have dwelt in Circadia."