There are things we take for granted, things that are underappreciated: like a good can opener, hitters who use the whole field, Little Debbies, George Strait.\u00a0 The sun belongs on that list. Since it\u2019s responsible for all life and energy on Earth, it\u2019s a pretty big deal.<\/p>\n
We for sure take the sun for granted in the summer when we\u2019re getting sixteen hours of solar power.\u00a0 If it\u2019s 90 degrees out, we do everything we can to hide from it.\u00a0 This time of year we notice the sun, but more for its absence.\u00a0 The days shorten.\u00a0 These are the cloudiest weeks.\u00a0 We get a time change that seems to rob more of our already shrinking light.<\/p>\n
If you are working outside, there are signs of day\u2019s-end as the Earth leans toward shadow and stillness by 3:30.\u00a0 The sun sets an hour later.\u00a0 By 5:00 it\u2019s dark, and morning is a long time away.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m told it\u2019s always been this way.\u00a0 I only noticed it a few years ago.\u00a0 Something about Last Kid moving out of the house brought this dismal pattern to my attention.\u00a0 That first November he was gone, after harvest\u2019s 16-hour workdays and busyness wound down, I began to notice the seemingly eternal darkness.\u00a0 Days didn\u2019t used to be this short before, right?<\/p>\n
When you\u2019re a kid, you live in the present moment, and conditions don\u2019t much matter.\u00a0 Then you get older and fall in love, and dark is a good thing.\u00a0 When you have your own kids, their demands consume the next couple of decades: diapers to homework to school activities to worrying when they\u2019re out late.\u00a0 When Last Kid left, I could take a breath.<\/p>\n
But an empty house gets darker faster.\u00a0 I suggested to friends that Global Darkening was a grave concern and we needed to do something about this affliction.\u00a0 They looked at me funny.<\/p>\n
It appears there\u2019s not much I can do about these long nights.\u00a0 Some evenings I might have a meeting to distract me.\u00a0 But when there are none of those, my body wants to go to sleep after supper, like some innate urge to hibernate.\u00a0 That\u2019d be great if I was a bear.<\/p>\n
On a summer evening there are a million things to do outside till dark.\u00a0 On a winter evening, I can either read something or watch something, both of which are effective at inducing a coma-like state.\u00a0 I like to snuggle on a corner of our couch with a book under a worn quilt with moose designs that Pam won years ago and would really like to throw away but it\u2019s my favorite.\u00a0 In that comfortable position, I get through about a page before my head slumps.\u00a0 So I go to the table and sit on a hard chair in the cold kitchen under a harsh light, where I might get five pages in before my eyes turn to lead.<\/p>\n
Typically, I go to bed after ten and get up at five.\u00a0 Giving in to hibernation-urges, I find myself going to bed at 9:30, which means I get up at 4:30.\u00a0 That night I am tired earlier, so I want to go to bed at 9:00.\u00a0 Which means I get up at 4:00.\u00a0 You can see where this is leading.\u00a0 Going to bed at 6:00 and getting up at midnight is not real practical.<\/p>\n
I told Pam as long as I was getting up this early, we should get some cows to milk.\u00a0 We\u2019re losing money on corn and soybeans; why not add a third unprofitable enterprise?\u00a0 She wasn\u2019t impressed with my business-sense.<\/p>\n
I understand this wretched darkness is part of some larger plan doing with the Earth\u2019s annual journey around the sun and the tilt of the planet going from one pole to the other.\u00a0 Over the course of a year, wherever you are on Earth, you will get an equal amount of day and night.\u00a0 Same for a lifetime; you\u2019ll get half day and half night.\u00a0 It all evens out in the end.<\/p>\n
Then I thought about the increasing number of my friends who are going south in the winter.\u00a0 They are travelling to where the days are longer and then coming back here when our days get longer. \u00a0It struck me that they\u2019re getting more than their fair share of sun.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure that should be legal.\u00a0 They should have to pay a Sun Excess Tax.<\/p>\n
Of course, we are advantaged over our ancestors to have artificial light available to us.\u00a0 A hundred years ago, dark meant dark.\u00a0 I heard an economist talk about how many hours of labor it took to purchase oil to light one room for one hour a century ago.\u00a0 Now we light whole houses for pennies.\u00a0 There is nowhere you can be at night in southern Minnesota except for maybe the deepest ravine and not see yard lights.\u00a0 Satellite photos of the planet at night show light glaring over large areas that aren\u2019t ocean.\u00a0 Now, dark isn\u2019t that dark.<\/p>\n
Some of us struggle to find a space dark enough to sleep well.\u00a0 And you might have heard that excessive manmade light is disrupting the migration patterns of birds.\u00a0 Humans, like all creatures, evolved with half a life in sun and half a life in dark.\u00a0 Who would have thought, but darkness is a commodity that might be in short supply?<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve got a few more weeks of the North Pole tilting further from the sun and dragging our little piece of Earth with it.\u00a0 These interminably long nights and abbreviated days will be with us for a while.\u00a0 We\u2019ll get through this.\u00a0 We need to stick together.\u00a0 If each of us tries to be a little nicer, a little less grumpy, maybe tell a few more jokes, we can do this.<\/p>\n
It helps that right around the longest dark and darkest long night Christmas comes.\u00a0 Even if Jesus\u2019 birth wasn\u2019t really on that date, it has been part of how we know the sacred birth since we were small children.\u00a0 That night seemed magic to us then and its charm spills into adulthood.<\/p>\n
Sometime in January, maybe February, you\u2019ll be driving home from work, and see a bit of sun still hanging on the western horizon.\u00a0 That\u2019ll be a sign that you made it.\u00a0 And you can look at the sun and wink and say, \u201cDon\u2019t be a stranger.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are things we take for granted, things that are underappreciated: like a good can opener, hitters who use the whole field, Little Debbies, George Strait.\u00a0 The sun belongs on that list. Since it\u2019s responsible for all life and energy on Earth, it\u2019s a pretty big deal. We for sure take the sun for granted …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weeds-by-randy-krzmarzick"],"aioseo_notices":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-22 16:09:31","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110559"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110560,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110559\/revisions\/110560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}