Time.
How
do you measure time?
Seems
like an easy enough question. (Though, to be fair, I suppose it’s
so easy that my asking it makes you suspicious. Touché.)
Regardless
of how you measure time, we all work from the same basic recipe.
Seconds
become minutes… minutes hours… days, weeks, months, years and
so on.
And
even for those running sunrise to sunset (no watch required),
we find it’s simply boarding the same bus at a different stop.
Time is fairly universal. It moves along, doesn’t stop, without
regard to our investments for using it.
The
trick is… time lies. (And your suspicions prove well-based.)
Consider
two people, born on the same day in different years. Thanks to
that extra February day, it’s possible that when each reaches
their respective fourth birthday, one would have lived an additional
twenty-four hours.
For
some significant… for some irrelevant… realistic is that little
does such measurement matter in the land of the fabled grand scheme.
For, after all, none are promised the same number of seconds…
minutes… days… in a lifetime. Leap year becomes a wonderful curiosity,
celebrated more so by those with a birthday that falls on February
29th.
Still…
in summary… four years does not always equal four years. Time
lies.
Rather
than time in general, I’ve been wondering about spring specifically
as of late.
Around
our house, the calendar markings of spring this year were essentially
welcomed by thirty inches of snow in our driveway. I grant you
that the dates didn’t overlap perfectly, but… well…
I
have this running joke about midnight. The basic idea is that
most of us simply don’t think about a day changing to the next
as the change happens. We celebrate New Year’s Eve, and we may
be aware of Friday transitioning to Saturday, but honestly, it’s
something that doesn’t register as a change that has taken place.
We don’t truly see Friday become Saturday.
And
from this, the theory that the day doesn’t change until you go
to sleep. Unlike when a watch arrives at midnight, most of us
do sense a change having gone to sleep on Friday and waking up
on Saturday. It’s a theory with corollaries supported by years
of working in an environment where the calendar day, work day,
and business day were three completely different things. (Calendar
based on the calendar… work based on an assigned shift… and business
closing for most departments at 6am. It was a scenario where,
literally, grave shift hours could be the first shift of the day
for some groups and the last shift of a different day for others
all at the same moments.)
It
should come as no surprise then that spring doesn’t exactly connect
with me when I look at the calendar.
Spring
has been arriving around here as the birds increase in variety
and numbers at the feeders in the backyard. But it truly arrived
this past week… as we near late April.
For
that was when I was able to start putting cloths out on the line
to dry. There is no surer sign of spring’s arrival than the scent
of Downey in the air. I even broke out the lawn mower for a celebratory
lap of the yard.
In
so many ways it’s amazing how most of the seasons… most things…
pay no attention to the actual calendar in the same way that recipes
for cookies will tell you to bake for something like 30 to 90
minutes or until golden brown.
Until
golden brown. The classic disclaimer. The classic twist to suggest
your results may vary.
Want
to start a garden? Some of the advice you’ll learn comes in the
form of telling you not to expose plants to the outdoors unless
you’ve past the last of the overnight frost threats. Alas, when
a few feet of snow have yet to melt as the spring season is declared
as arrived… well, that’s good for baking cookies and not quite
as good for putting plants in the ground.
The
hours filled with light are getting longer. Seems like just a
few days ago that Terry and I would finish up with work, head
out for home with the headlights on, darkness blanketing the neighborhood
well before 5pm. And now, we’re gazing into the yard to see the
goldfinches and woodpeckers and more make one final run to the
feeders before the sun goes down around 8.
How
do you measure time?
By
a watch? By the planting of a garden? By the setting sun? By a
batch of cookies?
I
have a list of things to get done around the yard tomorrow. Don’t
know if some rain will wash out the attempt… don’t know if I’ll
be able to finish all of them. But I will enjoy the time I invest
in the effort. Because it isn’t how you measure it… it’s how you
use it.