A5

By Jacob Erdman

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The leaves on the big poplars beside the house are now distributed generally across the yard and the surrounding fields. Piles of them collect on the porches, and even if today’s piles are swept away, tomorrow will see new ones take their places.

Chocolate-brown filigreed edges of leaves projecting over the rims show me that even the rain gutters have been filled and will have to be cleaned out before the ice and snow season is upon us and melt water overflows the clogged drains and threatens our footing below.

The last leaves on most of the trees departed in the furious gales we experienced recently. Even the ghostly white leaves of our white poplars could not hold on against the blasts of wind and rain. Unlike the sugar maples, that hold on the longest to the leaves that grew on the lower branches, the white poplars and most of that family of trees, the birches and the aspens, fly their last leaves at the very tops of the branches. In a calm autumn there will come a morning, usually after a sharp frost the night before, when our dooryard will be covered with multitudes of big, white, furry poplar leaves, very different from the small dark brown ones that fell earlier. Looking for all the world like some slightly skewed version of maple leaves, designed by someone who knew generally what a maple leaf looked like but was a bit hazy on the details, they stand out, abrupt and vivid, against their chocolate predecessors.

Curiously, although the maples and the poplars are riding under bare branches, some of the white birches, trees that look too frail to put up resistance to the storms of autumn, still, in spite of all the weather, carry a crown of golden leaves upon their heads.

Every morning, I look out across the breakfast offerings toward the woods beyond the old chicken house and the little orchard we planted years ago, to see whether a slender group of birch at the edge of the night pasture still dance in the breezes like young girls from some grand ball in a fairy tale. And in spite of it all, at least up to this morning, they are still there. It will not be long, I suspect, before their finery will have vanished in the night, leaving not even a glass slipper behind.

Not only have the leaves gone, so, suddenly, has gone the little daylight that was left to us of an evening. Every year, as Daylight Saving Time gives way to Standard Time, even though in theory we get back the hour we lost in the spring at that season’s corresponding change, I find the jump bothersome.

Having just survived a seventime- zone jump on the way back from Moscow a few weeks ago, I suppose the jump this year seemed rather more annoying than usual. Something I heard recently suggested that even a onehour change could upset one’s own internal time-keeping. Apparently flying across time zones, particularly from east to west, causes about a day’s disturbance for each time zone crossed, and it seems to me it was about a week after we returned home before day and night came when I thought they should. (Of course we had complicated the whole process by flying from Moscow to Toronto and then retracing our steps to get back to New Brunswick. I wonder whether going back a time zone improved matters or just further confused them?) Airlines don’t like it. Farmers generally seem to be hostile to the idea of daylight saving as well. Years ago, when we still kept a cow, I remember hearing of a farmer who changed his milking routine in five minute increments a day so as to avoid the abrupt shift of a whole hour.

When we still lived in the State of Virginia, nearly 50 years ago, the time shift was a matter of local determination. If we wanted to drive to Williamsburg, an hour or so away, and if we were paying attention, we would have had to change our watches several times as we went through farming land (ST), town (DST) and back through farmland. Williamsburg, as a Federal Historical Site, was on DST.

Benjamin Franklin apparently hatched the idea, more than 200 years ago. It would save thousands of pounds of tallow for candles, he thought. For all its apparent inevitability and the apparently obvious energy savings, there have been serious studies done, mostly in the mid-latitudes of the United States, which indicate that in fact more energy is used rather than less. If that is the case down there, one wonders what the case would be way up here? Maybe we should seriously consider asking Saskatchewan for residency status. They, at least, have never bought the time-shift.