"Here Comes the Sun"

This essay was published in a small community newsletter about February 1.

The sun is, indeed, coming back, and the days are getting longer. Remember that song by George Harrison?

“Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter,
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here,
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
And I say it's all right…”

After a long and lonely covid year, winter just seemed to clinch the mood. (Some of us, of course, managed to go south and escape at least the worst of the cold and darkness, even if not the horror of covid.)

But spring is coming. And the light. And the vaccine.

A little detail: It was darkest back in December, when the sun rose at about 8:00 AM and set at about 5:00 PM. The difference between sunrise and sunset was only 9 hours. Now, in February, we’re getting almost an hour more daylight, most of it in the afternoon. The sun rises ten minutes earlier and sets forty minutes later.

And that rate of change is getting faster. Around March 20 near the spring equinox, the sun will rise at 7:35 AM and set at 7:48 PM; the difference between them is 12 hours and 13 minutes. Every week, we are getting almost 20 more minutes of daylight. In June when the summer solstice occurs, the difference between sunrise and sunset will give us 15 hours and 18 minutes of sunlight, plus the daylight before sunrise and after sunset.

Notice that I say “about” a lot here. That’s because the times I got from timeanddate.com may differ a little from what we actually observe here in Centennial Farm. That’s also because we can’t see the actual horizon at either sunrise or sunset; they take place behind hills and trees and other obstructions. Because we are about 42 degrees north of the equator, we get our sunrise and sunset on a path that changes IN ANGLE from season to season. (If you’re keen on geometry, you can figure that out for yourself.)

It took me several years to get my head around the idea that sunrise and sunset don’t follow the same paths from season to season. And at the summer solstice, the earliest sunrise doesn’t occur on the same date as the latest sunset. Similarly, at winter solstice the latest sunrise doesn’t occur on the same date as the earliest sunset. The solstices are based on the average length of days. You’ve probably noticed that the solstices don’t even fall on the same calendar days every year. The earth wobbles a bit on its axis.

We think of the rotation of the earth and its revolution around the sun as fixed and as certain as anything in life. Well, it seems, not quite.

If we can adjust to these variations, we ought to be able to adjust to the vagaries of whether a vaccine will definitely prevent us from getting the virus, just as we accept that on next Thursday the sky MIGHT be sunny or cloudy, or that rain is MERELY FORECAST to begin tomorrow at 5:00 PM. When we will be able to safely gather with other people without masks or social distancing is only LIKELY at some particular date in the future.  We have to live with those uncertainties.

“Here comes the sun,” may involve some of that same uncertainty about when, even as we can be sure IT WILL COME. I still remember that old song from World War II, “When the lights come on again, all over the world,” and how I yearned for someone to assure me, “when.” Whether the outlook at any moment was good or not so good, I learned that I could not predict the date that peace would arrive. But I had faith that it would, indeed, come.

George Harrison first recorded “Here Comes the Sun” in the summer of 1969—another time when most of us were wishing for the end of a war. “Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter,” was as much about hope for all of us as it was about the seasons.

We might dig out that old recording and listen to it one more time.