Charlestown - turn back the clock!

At 2 AM, more or less
By Will Collette

As hard as it is to resist a good straight line, no, this is not another story about the Charlestown Planning Commission.

This is about the end of Daylight Savings Time and the beginning of dreaded Standard Time. While it takes place, officially, at 2 AM, most people change the clocks before they go to bed or Sunday morning.

Fire departments generally advise using the changing of the clocks as a good time to change the batteries in your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors (and if you don't have such detectors, to go and get them).

This is also the time of year when people with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) really start to feel it. Not only are the days actually shorter, but the switch back to Standard Time makes them feel shorter still.

The National Institutes of Health Library offers a quick reference guide to the symptoms, effects and ways to handle SAD. The intensity of the effects vary greatly. For some, the darkest part of winter, combined with the holiday seasons, can boost suicidal tendencies. For me, I usually get crankier than usual, if you can believe it.

However the change in the seasons, length of day and time affects you, please pay attention to the changes and take care of yourself.

Seek help if you can't handle it on your own.

Now, getting back to the Planning Commission.... As I've reported, there are numerous examples of this current Planning Commission's seeming fixation on returning Charlestown to by-gone days, to turning back the clock to simpler times when Charlestown was a strictly agrarian culture that survived on what hard work (as well as with the forced labor of slaves and indentured servants) could take from the farms, forest and the sea.

If not for straddling the old Post Road that connected Boston to New York, Charlestown would have been totally on its own and cut off from the outside world. They didn't have to worry about Seasonal Affective Disorder - they were more concerned about starving or freezing to death, or dying of flux or an infection from a wound that didn't heal. Work hard and die young, very young. And turn your sundials back when the summer and fall give way to winter.