The Hour That Comes Back

On the first Sunday of November the clocks fall back, and at two in the morning the night, which has been running a little ahead of itself all year, stops and lets the hour between one and two happen a second time.

Most of us receive it as a chore: a microwave to reset, a dashboard that stays wrong until spring, the faint pride of sleeping in. That is the narrow view of it. The wide view is that for one night you are handed sixty minutes that nobody has claimed, no calendar has pencilled in, and nobody expects anything of, and what two people do with an hour like that says more about them than any dinner they planned.

So do not plan it. The whole value of the hour is that it arrives unscheduled, and the moment you give it a purpose it becomes another evening. Stay up for it instead. Turn the lamps down to the color of weak tea, let the phone correct itself without a word, as it will, and leave the clock by the bed wrong for a little while, because a clock that disagrees with the rest of the house makes a good witness to a private arrangement.

Pour something small and slow (a short glass of port, three ounces at most, or an ounce and a half of whisky with a little water) and sit close enough that the glasses do not need to travel far. Spend the first one o’clock the way you spend every night: the week, the errands, who said what to whom. Let it run out. Then watch the second one o’clock arrive, an hour you have already used once, and say the thing that the first one did not have room for.

This is where the night does its quiet work. A second chance at an hour is a rare kind of permission. Whatever went unsaid in the first pass can be said in the second without it counting as late, because by the clock on the wall it is, impossibly, still on time. Confessions come easier in an hour that technically does not exist.

And the dark that follows is kinder for it. From that evening on the light fails earlier, the evenings pull in toward the lamps and the kitchen and the person across the room, and the season turns, without argument, toward the indoors. The extra hour is the last unhurried thing the autumn gives you before that happens. Spend it where it is warm.

One hour, given back once a year. Do not sleep through it alone.