These Are the Times of Our Lives
In Daylight Saving Time’s second week, my internal clock is catching up. In the morning, I can rise lazily with the sun just after 7 o’clock. But morning by morning I’ll be rising earlier as sunrise accelerates minute by minute. Those folks on the Eastern Shore whose job is releasing the sun are working faster every morning. We’ve gained 17 minutes of early light since setting our clocks ahead.
Later evenings make me think it’s spring, which it is, the sun having passed from winter’s side of the Vernal Equinox at 5:58pm EDT on Wednesday, March 20.
Breaking due east on the same horizon only an hour later was the first full moon of spring, the worm moon — a supermoon to boot — hovering close, relatively speaking, to its mother planet. The coincidence of those two astronomical events is a big deal, as the two have not come so closely in sync for 19 years and won’t again for another 11 years.
At the equinox, the sun sank due west at 7:17pm, giving us 12 hours, seven minutes and 54 seconds of daylight.
If you happened to have placed yourself far enough mid-Bay to have erased the shorescape, you could have had a full-color real-time view of both in close succession. (The equinox, however, passes with no such pomp and circumstance.)
These are special times. When nature gives us a well-timed show, it is worth watching.
Mother Nature is up to vernal tricks as well, pulling flowers out of barren earth and popping apparently dead sticks into leaf. At our feet, daffodils are making their yellow fuss, and both forsythia and goldfinches are rushing to keep up their role in the color front. High overhead, budding red maples are earning their name. Blushing-red house finches animate the giant bursting budscape. Green leaves furling in daily millimeters; winter wheat is rising green; there’s even hope for our lawns. The colorscape is changing.
These, too, are things worth watching. Bearing witness to nature’s steady clock improves our human timing.
The human calendar also wants our attention this time of year. We’ve just donned the green for St. Patrick’s Day, a feast whose broad appeal must be about more than the missionary success of some long-dead Anglo-Irish saint. Wild as that festival has become, at least in the US of A, I think it must — like Mardi Gras and May Day — draw its energy from spring’s life stirrings, giving humans an excuse to join in.
Maryland Day, historically March 25, is heralded in our pages this week. That annual notation of history does not promise party-hearty excesses equal to any of those all-out shebangs. But it does connect us to 385 years of our history, inviting us to consider who we are in the context of who we’ve been.
Maryland Day also gives us leave for what could be the first road trip of spring.
Regional road trips and I go back a long way. Early in my years as a reporter, partner photographer Sue Eslinger and I specialized in them. Our longest followed the Mississippi River from above St. Louis down to New Orleans. Mostly, however, we day-tripped in Illinois, stretching out from Abe Lincoln country in Springfield into doomed small towns about to be forgotten by history. As well as seeing the sights and finding a story, we’d always lunch on the road. Road trips demand lunch on the road.
Maryland has treated its history better than Illinois has. At the grass roots, citizens have organized to preserve the heritage of their communities. At the state level, the Maryland Heritage Trust supports the many local efforts with grants and training. In Anne Arundel County, many of them join together for Maryland Day to show us what makes each of them special.
Anne Arundel County’s Maryland Day celebration, coordinated by the Four Rivers Heritage Area, runs March 29 to 31. To give you time to plan a day trip (or two) into Maryland history, we’re featuring it in this week’s paper.
Start your celebration early with a road trip to historic St. Mary’s City or St. Clements’s Island, where you’ll encounter the deepest roots of Maryland history. Read on for what’s up there in 8 Days a Week.