Nearer the Light, My Love
by Lucy Hayden

Thankfully, I don't suffer from SAD. That's "Seasonal Affective Disorder," the antidote for which is to sit under a plant light all winter and try not to think about it. I do, however, suffer from a lesser known cousin of SAD called PATHOS. That's short for Pull And Tear Hair Out Syndrome. It only affects me for three months of the year, just a quarter of my life, really. There's no known cure, though I've heard that temporary relief can be had if you drive nonstop down to Mexico, guzzle a bottle of mescal--an elixir of fermented agave juice with a worm twist--and pass out on a beach for three months. I'm not sure that my much treasured yet painfully sensitive car would survive that particular remedy, so I just wait it out.

I don't wait passively. I mark the days.

If you were to graph the curves for sunrises and sunsets in winter, as I do, you'd know about the flat part of each curve--the Trough of Winter, a two-week period in late December and early January in which we, here, gain eight minutes of daylight in the evening, but have taken from us four minutes in the morning for no reason at all, so that the darkness of the morning shifts ever so slightly toward the darkness of night, frustrating the promise of winter solstice. The net sunlight gained during the Trough is somewhere around a minute a day. That's it.

And if you were to trace those curves through February and March, you would see them diverge steeply, leaving darkness behind in a great rush of energy, like a desperate, manic crocus shoving its head through the surface of the earth to sunlight. Ahhh, sunlight. It's free, it's abundant, and it's only bad for you if you lie around at midday in June, naked and coated in oil. I think. Don't take that as health advice, please.

I have no beliefs attached to the position of the earth in relation to the sun, unless you count believing that the days are going to get longer starting at a specific point, an exact minute burned into my brain like a cow brand. The Old Farmer's Almanac is good for something, you know. But I'm not a new-age egg balancer either. I only chart my winter according to the solstice and rejoice at the approach of spring equinox because if I don't, I'll think of something way worse. In Scandinavia and Russia, aquavit and vodka are the people's remedies. We in the remote Taconic Hills have our folk cures, too, subtle yet effective, involving the breakage of fine china, keening at the moon, and writing on walls with lipstick.

The days of spring are blessed. February 14 is a day of love because it marks the beginning of that steep ascent toward daylight. But the steaming heart of hope is April, the gorgeous, wonderful month when Eastern Daylight Time opens up the Hudson Valley evenings, and sunsets become, once more, a thing of beauty.

I hear there are states somewhere in the Midwest that have no Daylight Savings Time. They just live by the dictates of the sun. Well, that's okay if you like that sort of thing. Personally, I enjoy sitting on the patio at 8 PM, watching the sun, sweetly and ever so slowly, sink behind the Catskills, knowing that tomorrow it will set just a little bit later.

—Copyright © 2003