Time.
Is of the essence.
I see it falling on the ground like leaves, days ripped of the calendar and fanned across the lawn, some right side up and some up side down so there's red and grey, brightness and shadow, collected there.
Time always goes by so quickly. The clock tells me it's morning, the sky isn't light yet, but if I don't walk the dog right now -- I mean right now -- there won't be enough time before the kids are up and the breakfasts need making and the school bus needs meeting. So I walk in the cold, in the dark, through time I've stolen from myself, from my sleep, and when I return I'm warmer, a little more ready for the sun that's just lightening the sky, just starting to get in.
Then there are pockets of time that stagnate, moments that pass that should be whole, fat minutes slipping by. This is always when I'm sitting still but my mind is not still at all. When I'm asked to play babies by my two-year-old, when she wants me to sit here -- right here -- while she puts Band-aids on my arm. Time crawls then, and my skin will sometimes, too, because I know there are one million things I could be getting done, but I also understand the value of staying here, feeling her small fingers brush my arm. And so I sit, I keep my eyes off the clock, and I try to see her, not the laundry wrinkling all by itself in the cooling dryer. It has all the time in the world.
Sometimes I get to the end of the day and I'm gasping for time. My fantasy is a long stretch of nothing. I imagine myself bored, nothing to do, and I would wallow in that, sunk deep like in the tub, bubbles of time swirling around my toes like hot bath water. I could drink time, breathe it in, save it up, store it, bank it. Back when my kids were babies I thought a lot about borrowing time -- from where, though? -- I'd take it out on loan from someplace safe and the only thing I would want to do with it was sleep. Now I think that would be such a waste. Give me an extra hour and I'd probably do more ironing, or, you know, change the sheets for once. But the best thing would be to just sit and let every delicious minute pass without doing anything at all.
