Opinion: Daylight Saving

We went for a walk on Sunday evening after supper. It would have been easy to stay in the house — it was raining and cold and damp.

But it was the first day of daylight savings time and since having my chest split open and my heart tinkered with a few weeks ago, I try to get out whenever I can. Walking is good for me, I figure, a lot better than sitting around a cold house. (I can’t split firewood yet, so alas, no woodstove. The furnace heats the house just fine, but anyone who has a woodstove knows, furnace heat is not the same.)

As a notable aside, the nursing staff at the intermediate care unit of Logan Health Kalispell was outstanding. Standing out in particular were respiratory therapist Frank Sigler and nurse Brady Schultz. Frank came to the job with a passion I haven’t seen in years and Schultz and I just hit it off. Schultz is just a kid and worked the difficult night shift when I was there, but he really helped me out with some treatments that worked great.

The debate on whether we should keep daylight savings time seemed louder than usual this year. I think we’re doing the best we can with the switch and back and forth to standard time each year.

Yes, I miss the morning light at 7 a.m., but I also like going for walks in the evenings. Come June, if we were to stay with standard time, it would be getting light out at 3:30 a.m. and quite frankly, I’m just not ready to get up that early, even though every bird in my neighborhood would be.

Come winter, I’m pretty much ready for standard time. The days are going to be short no matter what, and I figure I’d rather have a little more sunshine in the morning, though admittedly, it isn’t much.

So it is what it is. I guess if we were truly honest about it, we’d recognize that our sense of time is wholly attached to this planet spinning on its axis and traveling around the sun. If we lived on Jupiter, it would be completely different, right?

At any rate, the walk was pleasant enough. The rain was barely a drizzle and it was quiet and no one was around. In other words, just about perfect for March and the first day of daylight savings time.