(I was going to do an NP list tonight consisting entirely of books, but I got sidetracked by work and other distractions, so maybe tomorrow night. For now, I’ll just do one of my periodic plugs for Michael Bérubé’s blog, which was typically, and brilliantly, on target yesterday. Oh, and it’s opening night of the NBA season tonight—yay, Charles and Kenny and E.J. back on my TV!—which means a basketball post is just around the corner.)

So with the clocks falling back this past weekend, it’s suddenly dark when I leave work, around 5:30-6:00 p.m. And when I get up at 5:45 a.m. on Thursday to go meet my trainer for the first of five sessions that I splurged on, I suppose it will be dark then too.

And that’s fine with me. Yeah, I know, most people hate the lack of daylight, but I love it, especially in the evenings. (My eyes don’t entirely love it, because I don’t see all that well at night, and the drive home in the dark can sometimes be a little bit unpleasant as a result…but the rest of me loves it.) I find the endless summer evenings oppressive, much as I find everything about summer oppressive, and the way the lasting light makes other people more public and more visible always annoys me. I’d rather have shorter days and longer nights.

Last night when I left work, the last traces of what must have been a beautiful sunset were still visible, and it was just cold enough, not uncomfortable at all, and the world looked so lovely, even the world as defined by the parking lot behind the old, nicely restored Freight House complex (all restaurants now, and cobblestones and brickwork) and the tracks and the old, also beautifully restored Union Station on the other side. (I love the neighborhood that my office is in; it’s an actual urban neighborhood, not fully gentrified yet and filled with interesting things to look at during those rare lunchtimes when I actually leave the office.)

It’s like a cocoon, this mid-fall darkness, and even more so in a real city. It brings back all sorts of vague but pleasant memories from childhood—driving home from my aunt and uncle’s house in White Plains and watching the scenery gradually change from big, comfortable houses to smaller, more ramshackle ones, to Co-op City and then the smaller buildings of the Bronx, to the decrepit buildings at the north end of Riverside Drive and finally to the elegant townhouses and stately prewar apartment buildings close to home—and all of those different places lit from within and looking like refuges from the windy, chilly outdoors. When I was a teenager, and then much later, when I lived in Park Slope, I used to love walking around in the late fall and early spring and glancing into the brightly lit windows to see the worlds inside of them. (I love it when people in the city leave their blinds or curtains open—not in any creepy way, of course, but just because it’s fascinating to get that five-second glimpse into somebody else’s life.) There’s something ineffably comforting about being outside but surrounded by the indoors, and I feel it most keenly at this time of year. In the heart of winter, I just want to get back to the other side of those windows and warm up, and in the summer I usually don’t want to leave the indoors at all, particularly here in the land of insufferable summers and ubiquitous central air conditioning. But this time of year is my time.

It’s also the time of year when I’m most homesick. New York from September through December is a blissful place to be. It hits me again in April and May, particularly in years when it gets hot in early May here, but it’s most powerful in the last months of the year. Some of it is nostalgia for a New York that no longer exists, but I still love New York, sanitized and chain-stored as it is, in the fall, and most especially at the holidays, when it’s overflowing with tourists and grouchy, weary Christmas shoppers but still beautiful, still breathtaking. Going home at Christmastime this year, for the first time since I left at the very end of 1999, will be bliss. (I hope.)

And yeah, I start to feel a little bleak sometime in January, when I haven’t seen daylight on a weekday for six weeks or so. But that’s the thing about this little cocoon of daylight savings time-deprived darkness: it doesn’t last all that long. By the end of January, the daylight is lasting noticeably longer and the darkness is starting to lift. I think it has to work that way; otherwise, no one would survive February.