night sunrise daylight
sunset nautical twilight
astronomical!
There are a lot things that someone who spent the first 50 years of their life in the Great Lakes state of Michigan has to adjust if they move south.
A lot of things, LET ME TELL YOU!
You do adjust.
I once went to a company breakfast, got a bowl, broke a biscuit in half and put it in the bowl, put some sausage patties on the biscuits, covered the sausage with scrambled eggs, added some grits on top of the eggs and covered it all with sausage gravy … and never thought nothing about it.
But I digress.
Something no one ever mentioned to me is what happens to twilight when you move south.
I now live in Bluffton, SC which is almost 1,000 miles south or 10 degrees of latitude (32°14′14″N to 42°57′48″N) south of Grand Rapids, where I grew up.
Look out the window and you see the orange sky of sunset.
Put on your shoes and go outside and by the time your get outside, its dark.
Using the wonderful calculator at https://suncalc.net/, I learned that in Grand Rapids, the difference between official SUNSET and NIGHT is 110 minutes while in Bluffton, due to curvature and angle of the earth, it is only 86 minutes.
This is defined using the wonderful delimiters of sunrise, sunset, daylight, night along with civil twilight, nautical twilight, astronomical twilight.
24 minutes may not seem like a lot but when it gets dark down here, someone hits a switch and it’s dark!
There is none of the lingering twilight that I remember as a kid growing up when the twilight went on forever.
Garrison Keillor once wrote (or said) that … “kids didn’t need a watch; they could tell time by the sun. Noon was when your shadow was shortest.”
I know what Mr. Keillor means.
Growing up I never wore a watch but always seemed to know what time it was.
Seems to me that the rule was to be inside “when the street lights came on” and with the lingering twilight of Western Michigan, we could be outside for a long time.
The City of Grand Rapids had a moment of wisdom somewhere in its history and the city officially adhered to what was the called the CITY SCHOOL/CITY PARK PLAN.
This plan called for large public parks to be built up around public schools so that neighborhoods got fields and playgrounds that the kids used for recess during the school year.
Schools weren’t surrounded by businesses or factories, but by a ball field and a black top and playground equipment and some woods if possible.
In our neighbor, the school was Crestview Elementary.
It was built during the baby boom expansion of the North End of Grand Rapids.
It was U shaped with the main entrance, which kids never used, at the outside top of the U and a blacktop connecting the two arms of the U.
The black top had a basketball court painted in thick yellow lines along with more yellow lines for hopscotch and four square.
Across the black top was our playground.
It was a square, surrounded by a chain link fence with gates at the bottom and on the right, if you had your back to the school.
It had a merry go round of heavy, thick rusted metal that screamed “get a cut, get tetanus” and it was on some sort of spindle that groaned and moaned as it spun over a concrete base with space just wide enough to stick your arm under and get it sliced off with no trouble if you weren’t careful.
Every once in a while, the mechanism got lubricated or something and with a couple of kids pushing, you could reach g forces that rivaled a NASA centrifuge and if you weren’t careful, you could let go and fly across the playground.
A few rides on the merry go ground and you were also ready to lose your lunch if you didn’t sit down for a while.
Across from the merry Go round were the blocks and barrels.
The blocks were big concrete blocks with letters about 3 feet wide on each side and must have weighed a ton each.
The were piled up for us to climb on and crawl over.
The barrels where sections of giant water pipe at least 4 feet in diameter as when we were in the lower grades, we could walk through them standing up.
Little kids walked through them.
Bigger kids ran and jumped to sit on top which was no easy feat as there was nothing to grab on top so you could go up and right over and right over and down head first.
The biggest kids and the dare devils would stand on the barrels and run and jump from barrel to barrel.
As I remember, there where five barrels in a line that was slightly curved and they were spaced further and further apart so you had to get your speed up to make that last jump as well as keep your footing on the very top of the barrel and since they weren’t lined up the chances of landing off center and losing your footing was very real.
Did I mention these barrels were also made of concrete?
Thank goodness for sneakers!
In the corner of the playground, opposite the merry go round was the monkey bars.
This was a scaffolding type arrangement of polished slippery pipe, in the circular shape of rocket and must have been about 20 feet high OR almost two stories!
You could climb and jump off or climb and hang down from the top INSIDE the monkey bars and drop.
Or you could climb and be pushed.
There was also a set of three sliders.
Two were about 10 feet high and then there was THE BIG SLIDER.
It also must have been about 20 feet high.
For a little kid, it was a vertical climb up a steel ladder to a 2 foot square platform with low rails.
It was better than any Cedar Point thrill ride and the threat of death was real!
There were teeter totters, horse swings and little kid swings.
All made made with heavy duty lumber and rusted metals with lots of sharp edges and splinters.
Across from this playground were the BIG SWINGS which were in there own chain link space and were supposed to be just for the upper elementary kids.
As I remember there was also an argument of morning recess vs afternoon recess and if the swings where reserved as BOY SWINGS or GIRL SWINGS.
Seems like no one ever knew, but you called if for your gender if you wanted to swing but for the most part swings were not much noticed but the big kids.
Past the playground was our field.
It had a pretty sad baseball diamond but it was huge expanse that went on forever.
It also had some steep hills were we would go sledding in Winter time but we couldn’t bring our sleds to school so me made slides on the hill that we slide in on in our snow boots.
Also in winter, the field was were we would have snow ball fights, usually the 6th grade boys against everyone else.
This was against the rules and every once in awhile participants would be marched off for a talk with the Principal but the snowball fights were always part winter recess.
It was as if the school and the Board of Education provided all this equipment and parkland to enougrage us to go out and get killed or at least maimed for life.
And here’s the thing.
I don’t remember one time when anyone was badly hurt or that an ambulance had to be called.
Today, schools would have an ambulance parked at the playground entrance.
Oh sure, the rumor flew around once that Timmy Sugiyama slipped jumping barrels and ‘CRACKED HIS HEAD OPEN’ and we came running to see.
I expected to see Timmy lying there with his skull cracked like an egg with his brain all over like a broke yolk but he was gone by the time I got there and Timmy later showed up with a big bandaid on his forehead and that was that.
This was during school mind you.
During the school day.
When school was out of it was summer time, this was out neighborhood park and often you would find your way to the park and just as often, friends from school would be there.
Back then kids didn’t need a watch; they could tell time by the sun. Noon was when your shadow was shortest.
And twilight was when you met your friends at the park.
Because in Michigan, twilight went on forever.
No Haiku For You 