The First Sign of Winter

On November 5th 2023, the sun slips away from the afternoon sky. I’m bamboozled—what is going on? And then my roommate tells me: today, the clock changes. Daylight savings time is over.

When something ridiculous like this happens, when time changes on a whim, you’re suddenly brought in contact with how some things we take as fact are completely made up. What is 4pm? We simply decided that the time is 4pm and agreed on what that means. When the sun scurries home an hour earlier than it should, these rules reveal themselves as artificial and crumble away. The only things that remain are the star-speckled skies, the trees blanketed in velvety twilight, and the rustle of autumn leaves against the cold.

I slip on my thick winter jacket, beanie, and gloves, and make my way to the trail near my house. Slivers of light filter through my sky into someone else’s dawn. With every darkening moment, I feel more and more like a fairy in the woods. Something mystical has happened. The guards of the world have fallen, blending afternoon and evening into an endless blueness I could cast ripples into with the touch of a fingertip. I feel the chill on my face with delight. Winter is here.

I don’t know it yet, but in a few weeks, I am going to experience my first snow. I’ll get a text that it’s snowing on Burnaby Mountain, scramble to get onto a bus, then stand at the center of soft swirling flakes till my socks are drenched, and them some. In a few more weeks, the trees will lose all their leaves and divulge their beautiful geometric patterns– branches eager to hold onto one another, an intimacy otherwise concealed. In a few months, I will walk back to this trail to see spring break into the ground through tiny buds and saplings.

But we’re not there yet. Right now, I’m in the middle of the woods, time has spun out of sense, night has no rush to turn into day, and moonlight will rest on the fallen leaves for hours and hours and hours.