Time Out

The predicted late winter snow storm is ramping up with its companion wind, gusty and brittle.

It is mid-March and Vermont has already had a few days of balmy, faux spring tricking my senses into believing that wintertime has passed. Now, my sense of time is reversed, plunged back to January. 

As if I needed more disorientation, the news reminds me that today is also when we change our clocks, losing  a precious hour of sleep and throwing my circadian rhythm into disarray. I can now put to rest my November procrastination of changing my car clock. How did time go so fast?

I think I have a partial answer. For my great-grandson, Carter who is 10, a year is one tenth of his life, a relatively large fraction and long portion his life. For me, a year is quite a different matter, only a small fraction of my octogenarian life. I blink and a year has gone; the announcement of a pregnancy is now a bouncing baby.  

The time represented by the last couple of years has seen such drastic changes … people moving in and moving out … businesses closing, job concepts altering, politics changing, controversy and conspiracy rampant. Never a fan or believer that the “good old days” were all that good, I am exercising a woman’s prerogative to slightly change direction. I want to blink and again experience a simple, more trustworthy time. But who among us has not occasionally chanted Elizabeth Akers Allen’s poem (even if we did know the source)?

     Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,

    Make me a child again just for tonight!

 But this cannot be. 

Despite the momentary time-warping disorientation, there are orientating markers. The glorious sun rises on another day. The morning coffee brewed and savored and the pesky cat meowing to be fed anchor my morning and defy time and age. There are chores to be done … the fridge needs cleaning and the laundry needs doing. A birthday card needs sending and a child needs hugging before the sun flames below the horizon of another day.

Time to get to it ...

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