7 AM Eastern Winter Time

I go to Palisades Avenue in Englewood nearly every morning at 7 AM. I have come to expect it to be dark and dreary. Much to my surprise, this week I arrived to find that it was considerably brighter. What a relief! Winter is far from over -- snow is expected today in fact -- but nights are getting shorter and the days are getting longer so Spring cannot be far behind. All of this made me think about seasons on Main Street. Main Streets are tenaciously busy: the tracks in the snow are mute testimony to the many comings and goings throughout the day and night. But the ways of moving are tempered by weather. People walk quickly and rush inside on cold winter days. They linger over their coffee cups looking out the window with dreams in their eyes. In the summer they don't want to go in and they drink ice coffee while delighting in the patterns of the sidewalk ballet. In an urbanized world with cars and indoor heating we tend to keep going no matter what. We can lose sight of the cycles of the natural world, as I did in thinking it would always be dark at 7 AM. Yet if we look more closely, we find Copernicus was right and Main Street, like the rest of the Earth, revolves around the sun.