Last Days of the Year: Finding Time
A snag makes a natural sundial on Jacoby Creek. (All photos by Audrey Hackett)
By Audrey Hackett
Walking Agraria one sunny morning this week, as the deep cold lifted, I found time everywhere.
I found time in the deep, cloven tracks of the deer and the light, rampaging ones of the squirrel. Animals had passed this way — last night, two days ago — and the record was preserved.
I found time in the boot prints that followed the road, then plunged into the open fields. People had passed this way, and that record, too, was preserved, in a crisp and intricate mosaic. Some prints were so clear the boot brand was legible.
I found time in the natural sundial of a snag. A tapered shadow went out from it, marking the hour on the frozen face of the creek. As the sun wheeled in the sky, the shadow wheeled around this still point. On an actual sundial, the vertical indicator is called a “gnomon,” a mysterious-sounding word whose deep root means “to know.”
To know. An old song comes to mind, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” It’s a song I remember hearing on the radio during my 1970s childhood, one I called to myself a “faraway” song — it pointed (like an existential sundial) to thoughts and truths I wanted to get to.
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Well, not really.
For most of our human lives, time is a matter of milestones and increments. Our clocks and calendars are nets over time, but they can’t catch time, any more than a net can trap water.
And yet — something moves forward, doesn’t it? The seasons are cyclical, but our lives are vectored. We’re born; we die. However much we attune ourselves to the cyclical aspect of our experience — and it’s certainly there, and deeply worth attending to — the big arrow of time remains, shooting us to the end.
Beyond the end is speculation, blue ice and air …
Strangely, it feels good to feel time passing. I love the last days of the year; I love to feel the year running out and running through me. The surface of my life can seem static and solid, like the iced-over stream. But there’s a little trickle underneath carrying the current, the passing-present, into the future. I feel that in late December, feel it viscerally.
This week, walking Agraria, I found time in the heaping, the shrinking, the falling, the holding, the scalloping, the glittering powdery wind-fluttered uplifting of snow. Snow that seems so passive, yet is rich, the landscape showed me, in antics.
I found time when, in the middle of the afternoon, I returned to the same fields, and the snow had pulled back, like a self-consuming tide, from the body of the land. Underneath was softening ground: a dress-rehearsal spring.
I found time in the dissolving boot prints, shaped — I suddenly saw — like an hourglass.
Ready to be tipped over again. A cycle that we’re part of, yet also, only, wondrously, for such a little while, passing through.
*Audrey Hackett is associate editor of Agraria Journal.
Agraria Barn, from a distance
