This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack for the Second Week Of Middle Spring
I keep a daybook of things that happen in nature. And I have been thinking how if I erased the year from each of my daybook entries, I could compress the sense of passage into a seamless impression. If I eliminated or exaggerated the repetitions of incidents from different years, smoothed the transitions a little, cut or explained contradictory events, then, for example, thirty years of April 10ths could be made into one day. The greatest discoveries and beauties in days many decades past would color the new story in such an exemplary day.
My correspondents from over twenty and thirty years (Fern, Jane, Casey, Bob, Catherine, Rick, Frances, Liz, Ruby, Ed, John and so many others) would speak to this one day. Individual voices would join in chorus. The old days and sounds, combined, might become larger than life – as if they were lived in a single instant.
And I might add something new from this particular day, adjust and sculpt a little more, maybe even embellish here and there, cheat a little by pulling in pieces of previous or later days, choose to reimagine what might have happened and could have happened but did not actually happen, revise and refine, rewrite from primary and secondary sources into present or prediction or fiction.
Then all of the outside of the days would be pushed into the inside of the days, just like what happens in my mind, where everything is arbitrary, ambivalent, translucent, more color and scent than word or idea, more feeling than calendar.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the third week of middle spring. In the meantime, re-imagine your days. They are waiting for you.
