Time

Sunrise last week off of French's Island, Freeport

My first day back in Maine, I joined my grandparents and my aunt Robin for a sunset ride on the mail boat that runs daily through Casco bay. Robin lives with my uncle Eric on their sailboat, Runaway, in Marina del Rey in Los Angeles. When I was in middle school, she and Eric sailed around the world, and I grew up listening to stories of her travels. They spent one Christmas in Graciosa, my last stop in the Canaries, and it was nice to compare experiences and talk about changes. When she left for the airport she handed me an excerpt from John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius. Tucked into a string of dialogue is a paragraph that describes the passage of time - without ever mentioning it - wonderfully. I thought I’d include an excerpt here:

“O the days, the days in their all but unnoticed beauty and variety—days of hurtling sun and shade like the dapples of an exhilarated beast, days of steady strong cold and a blood-red dusk, tawny autumn days smelling of hay and grapes, spring days tasting of salty wave-froth and hearth smoke blown down from the chimney pots, misty days of sifted sunshine and gentle fitful rain that glistened and purred on the windowsill like a silvery cat, days of luxurious tall clouds that brought thunder east from Jutland,…days of high ribbed skies like an angel’s carcass, December days of howling sideways snow, March days of hail from the north like an angry knocking at the door, June days when greenness smothered every vista, days without qualities, days with a hole in the middle, days that never knew their own mind and ended in insomnia, days of travel…”

Speaking of time, check out Irene's blog, All the Time in the World: http://travelsalabillypilgrim.blogspot.com/. She was my roommate at the Conference and I hope a life long friend! She talked to people about time for a year - and brought a sketchbook with her filled with different drawings of "time" from her travels. What would you draw?