In my living room are two wooden eight-day clocks, wind-up clocks complete with pendulums, that once kept time in the school where my wife’s father taught during the first half of the last century. Long ago (well, about in the 1980s), one of wooden clocks stopped working at 6:03, and then the other at 10:49. Each clock now tells the correct time only twice a day.
A few days ago, at 6:03 and 10:49, I took a walk in the woods and wetlands to take an account of the progress of early summer. I found black damselflies with white wingtips by the river. Wood mint was waist high, and catchweed burs were catching on my pants legs. I heard maybe a dozen field crickets singing. And so went the inventory, on and on.
And when I take another inventory in a week or two, I will find absences, connections and entirely new phenomena. I will see that the observations made on June 2 were just an arbitrary gate that opened onto a finite and now vanished step of time.
Like the frozen hands on the silent wind-up clocks, my inventory will prove accurate only when the relevant cycle is repeated. In the meantime, it might seem to be deceptive, static and out of sync with growth and decay and real time. But really it is just a reminder of the moment.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the third week of early summer. In the meantime, of course, carpe momentum: capture the moment.
