Daylight Savings (House on Fire)

Daylight Savings Time has been controversial since its inception. People do not like it when you mess with time. The clock in the head must match the clock of the day or else one risks madness. There is no time like the present, and daylight savings moves the present backward (or is it forward?) in time. We become dislocated from the hours. Sunrise is too early. Sunset is too late. We are at odds with time. Grand-Mère Godot always had difficulty adapting to this adjustment in time. Her sense of the hour was profound. She could wake and tell you the time to the minute. When the order came to adjust the clocks, she herself became maladjusted. For several months of the year she was perpetually late or early. As time passed she would slowly adjust, her clock sidling up to match the adjusted clock of the world around her. Many of us learned to adapt to grand-mère time but strangers and distant relatives were often perplexed, frustrated, and even annoyed at her insistence that it was too early or too late to be whatever time the clock reported. When she died she was cremated. She requested her ashes be scattered on the Champs, and that whoever do it circumambulate the arena in a counterclockwise motion. Until someone is able to afford the journey, her ashes are stored in a humble urn on the mantle at Villa Godot, next to a clock that is never adjusted and only tolls at random hours.