Time
Just days ago, I took a photo of my small family. They sit in a pool of light cast by an overhead lamp, all three of them on one big, old, deep blue armchair. My two children are perched on one of the arms together, and my husband sits in the seat. He is speaking to the children, animatedly. They are all discussing an incident that just occurred, a misunderstanding.
Above the heads of my children the far wall of the staircase runs upwards. The wall is covered with frames, each containing a photo of my children, all of them taken years ago. My daughter is pictured with soft cheeks, wisps of toddler hair framing her face, wearing the hat of her grandfather whom she never met. My daughter is now seven, all long limbs and angles and vast, endless questions. In one photo, my son, a baby, lies on his belly on a blanket in the woods. His head lifts, taking every ounce of new neck strength he can muster, and he is grinning. A time before words, before steps, before solid food and being asked to do anything for himself. He is now four and has a habit of dropping his speaking voice several octaves when he feels serious or pleased with himself. “I’m trying out my grown-up voice, Mom,” he once told me matter-of-factly.
A “new year” was a tricky concept for my son. “Do you mean it is going to be summer tomorrow?” he asked me on New Year’s Eve. “Why is it a new year?”
My explanations were decidedly arbitrary in nature and he ended the conversation, bored with insufficient answers.
I didn’t blame him. I don’t know how to describe the concept of time, not really, not in a way that does it justice. How to separate it out neatly, when the past weaves through the present just as much as the future?
Here is what I do know.
When I watch my young children with my parents, I want to slow the clock so I can drink and drink and drink that particular sweet nectar.
My Granny will be 96 in February. I cannot comprehend the vastness of such a life. I hope to be so lucky. Most days, these days, she seems tired. I think, well, yes, that’s a lot of living. I wonder where her mind floats, how she might be pondering what is to come.
Before I had children, I didn’t think too much about time’s passage. I was thirsty for the next day, the next experience. I chased life and filled every moment. Now, I crave vast, open spaces because, for me at least, that’s when everything slows to a savorable measure. Now, I know life cannot be chased because it is here, now, always.
When my babies were very little, I watched the clock, willing it to tick a little faster, please. The hours alone with infants stretched in a way that I found very hard to navigate. Now, I want everything to slow down; I feel each moment flying by as they read to me, and lose teeth, and stand side by side in the kitchen, cooking for their father and I.
Working, as I do, on climate solutions….no, living, as I do, in the world today, I feel a particular pressure in the passage of time. So much is still possible, but the window is closing quickly…
Memory is the trickiest bit of all. Past but present: the feel of my childhood bed, the magic of a childhood Christmas Eve, the particular wild “whoopee!” my Granny would let loose when she danced, my mother’s voice as she read our bedtime stories, my father rising far too early for work in the deep dark each morning, the volume of his laugh.
There is a particular memory from my childhood that consistently rises to the top. This memory is not of a birthday, or injury, or great accomplishment, or of anything particularly noteworthy. In it, I am lying on my back in a freshly formed snow fort. My body is weary after a long day of playing in the new snow. Unlike my younger sister, however, I did not go inside as dusk began to fall. For some reason that I no longer recall, I decided to stay outside, unafraid of the increasing darkness, lying on my back with snow walls rising on either side of me.
Overhead, the tall pines that framed our driveway reach up into the evening sky. I can barely make out the branches in the little light that is left, but I can hear them. A breeze picked up as the sun dipped below the horizon, and now it moves through the pine boughs. I lie and listen and it is as if I am hearing the Earth breathing. My whole little body relaxes, completely at ease, remarkable for a child who lived her life alert to potential danger.
Whenever I hear pines move with the wind, I remember that moment and I feel it rise from somewhere deep within the composition of who I am today. I am not the girl in the snow, any more than my son is the tiny baby or my daughter is the soft toddler in the photos above our stairs. But she is still there, within me.
They are all still there. As I walk the woods around our home, echoes surround me. There, I supported my daughter before she could stand while she closely examined the particular feel of the moss encircling a rock. There, my husband and I sat with my son between us, on his birthday, and watched, breathless, as an eagle chased an osprey. There, I stood with my daughter riding just behind my head in the hiking backpack and we watched for many minutes, mesmerized, as a squirrel devoured a pinecone, the squirrel staring at us with equal intensity. The echoes are everywhere, so tangible, I almost believe I could reach out and touch each former version of ourselves.
Past, present, future. Perhaps time is nothing more than a concept, a way to understand the passage of something that never fully passes but returns, over and over, to be savored again
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