Long Nights, Short Days

Dear Diary,

Turning back the clocks last Saturday has begun the darkening of the days. Each day the sun sets earlier and earlier. I was just reading about how our ancestors of 2 or 3 hundred years ago use to have two sleeping periods. One would last from sunset to around midnight and then they would rise for a time and then go back to bed until sunset. There lives were govern by the light.

Now, we flip a switch and artificially illuminate our world. We are no longer dependent on the natural light. Our daily rhythms are so different in the 21st century. Yesterday I was able to trace my family line back 23 generations to 1220 in England. I also learned that only one of my ancestors from that line survived the Black Death that killed millions of people in the 1300's. One person...and from him I am descended.

Perhaps that's where my grandmother got her strong immune system that allowed her to nurse through a more recent plague...the great influenza epidemic of 1919. I seem to have inherited that same immune system. I never got any of the normal childhood illness...measles, mumps, chicken pox. We carry around the genetic codes of countless generations within us and we seldom give it a second thought.

In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin,—seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is. - Ralph Waldo Emerson


Update: Since I wrote this a few hours ago I found two more direct descendents going back to 1160 in Yorkshire, England. The detective work continues....