the hole where time goes

My days feel so full lately. And it's a good thing, for it means that life is sweet and good, and moving along in just the right way. But time also feels so fleeting and full of ever-present nostalgia. I spent the weekend at my aunt's house in Pennsylvania, and on Sunday my eight year old cousin John woke me up at sunrise. I showered, dressed, then settled into a chair near the window, resting my socked feet atop the tiny bed against the wall. John was eager to show me one cartoon or another, but it felt like time to read instead, and I convinced him to stay. He climbed atop the pile of blankets on the bed, and looked at his new pop-up Star Wars book while I read about lambing season, preparing a pigpen, the death of a foster sibling, and a home-birth. It was mingled with interjections about galactic battles and jedi knights, of course, which made the moment all the more perfect. 

"Down on the woodpile sits a mason jar. The day we stacked wood Amy noticed me sweating, and unbidden, filled the jar with water and brought it to me. I drank it down to an inch from the bottom and set it atop the stack, where it sat at such an angle that now the base is filled with a puck of ice. I see the glass there on the split oak and turn immediately maudlin, blindsided by the idea that the jar and the water are representative of how the most fluid, workaday moments become fixed in sweet irretrievable history in the very instant of their occurring ... I am churning away as usual, constantly rearranging the days into an endless chain of last-minutes. I see that glass as an emblem of placidity surrounded by the snarl of my subsequent overbooked peregrinations and hustle. Long ago, I think, my daughter drew water and brought it to me. A grand thing in its simplicity. I lift the jar, then replace it, suddenly convinced that it covers a hole where all the time drains away." 

-from Coop: A Year of Poultry Pigs & Parenting by Michael Perry

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