I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

Every fall in many states, including Ohio, we set the clocks back one hour for daylight saving time.

We call it falling back.

And in the spring, we set our clocks forward one hour.

We spring forward.

What this means is that what we experience as 6 p.m. one day is 5 p.m. or 7 p.m. the next. My kids would point out how arbitrary that was

and asked questions like, so it's seven o'clock now just because they say it is?

My answer was something like, uh, yeah?

Because it's strange to me, too.

Nothing makes it clearer that time is a construct like daylight saving time.

Frankly, I'm grateful that my phone and computer update automatically.

The clock on my microwave and the clock on my oven never match.

They're different, and both are wrong, because I never bother to set them ahead or back. Time zones are something else I had to

attempt to explain to my children early on because of work travel. When I travel away from my kids, I have to coordinate our calls, which means demystifying

the difference between my time and their time.

I'm three hours behind you in California, or I'm seven hours ahead of you in Greece.

All of this talk about my time and your time is so odd anyway when you think about it,

as if any time is ours.

That's hours, O-U-R-S.

No pun intended.

Today's poem is a persona poem spoken by a clock, so it addresses the idea of time in an imaginative way.

And in a sense, a clock is already something we humanize, metaphorically, given its face

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