IT'S ABOUT TIME

I MAY HAVE BITTEN OFF more than I can chew in accepting the position of editor of the Manor newsletter.
My style is far different than that of the previous editor's, which of course is as it should be. But at the stage of life that we find ourselves here, there can be great resistance to change. I'm feeling my way, hoping there won't be too many complaints. Either I'm being shielded from them, or there haven't been any about the first month I took the position. So here is my column for February's newsletter which won't be slipped under our doors until next Tuesday night.

IT’S ABOUT TIME

“It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown........as for children......the days are long with the gathering of experience.”

George Gissing

“Never, never again

This moment, never, those slow

ripples across smooth water,

Never again these clouds white and gray....

The sun that rose from the sea this morning will never return for the broadcast light that

brightens the leaves and glances on water will travel tonight on its long journey, out of the universe, never this sun, this world, and never again this watcher.”

                                    Kathleen Raine

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Where in the world does the time go? I thought, when I queried some residents about it that some would report that time passes slowly for them, but to a person, everyone I asked gave some version of fast..... from Jeanne G’s ”It goes rapidly”, to Betty K: “It passes quickly because I stay involved with volunteer activities.” and, Jeanne K’s  “Time goes faster and faster..... so many things I plan to do. One of the problems is that I’m not fast anymore.” Jim H. said, “It just zips by.......even when I was confined to my room for months with a bad case of the shingles.” Mr. Bob’s favorite phrase to Jane is “Hurry, every chance you get.” and he feels that time goes extremely fast. 

My guess is that in the Health Center time passes more slowly for the patients. In my experience, time has crawled when I’ve been ill with something as serious as the flu. Then time simply crawls. I remember sleeping and sleeping some more and looking at the clock and 4 minutes had passed.

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Someone once observed that life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes. 

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What do you get when you cross a kangaroo with a calendar? 

A leap year! 

Did you realize that February this year brings us an extra day.......a whole 24 hours that we didn’t have last year? How are you going to use yours? 

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“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment,sparkling like a star in our hand...... And melting like a snowflake.”

                           Marie Beyon Ray

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Not included in the newsletter is this question which I pose to you.


Are you an "over" or an "under" in the great debate about toilet tissue? At our house, we're "over" people.

FOUND QUOTATION

WHILE DOING SOME WORK on the February newsletter last evening, I came upon the quotation I wanted yesterday to go with the cloud pictures.  My filing system isn't what it should be.

And when I awakened this morning and lay there gazing at the sky from our place in the universe, the clouds slowly became tinted and I had to leave my warm nest to go get my camera.

“Never, never again

This moment, never, those slow

ripples across smooth water,

Never again these clouds white and gray....

The sun that rose from the sea this morning will never return for the broadcast light that

brightens the leaves and glances on water will travel tonight on its long journey, out of the universe, never this sun, this world, and never again this watcher.”

                                    Kathleen Raine

To me, it's interesting to realize that we, too, are changing  minute by minute and won't ever be quite the same as we were just seconds ago. 

SKIES

RECENTLY I found a perfect quotation to go with pictures of clouds. It was about the sky never looking the same and the need to realize that we are looking at a never-to-be-repeated scene each time we observe the sky. The words were profound and lovely and deep and I'll be damned if I know where to find them.

So, what I offer you today is second best, if indeed that. Should you be close to a window, lift your eyes and marvel at something you'll never see again.




"I saw two clouds at morning
Tinged by the rising sun,
And in the dawn they floated on
And mingled into one."
~John Gardiner Calkins Brainard



“A pessimist only sees the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all--he's walking on them.”
              Leonard L. Levinson




“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
                     Rabindranath Tagore



"I wandered lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o'er vales and hills..."
               ~William Wordsworth



"See yonder little cloud, that, borne aloft
So tenderly by the wind, floats fast away
Over the snowy peaks!"
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow



"When I admire the wonder of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in worship of the Creator. "

                     ~Mahatma Gandhi



"Those playful fancies of the mighty sky."
                                    Albert Smith



“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time”
                               John Lubbock



"There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul." 

                                   Victor Hugo                                                           

"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes."
                    ~Ralph Waldo Emerson



" I think the world really boils down to two types of people - those who see shapes in cloud formations, and those who just see clouds. " ~Terri Guillemets



"Gray skies are just clouds passing over."
                            ~Author Unknown

MORE "DANDELION WINE"

DIPPING AGAIN into my book of quotations that resonated with me, here are some more passages from "Dandelion Wine". It's a semi-autobiographical novel set in small town America in 1928 reminiscent of the author's own boyhood. I'm not a science fiction reader, or I would by now have devoured all of Ray Bradbury's books........... his way with words is exceptionally fine. See if you agree......

 "About seven o'clock you could hear the chairs scraping back from the tables, someone experimenting with a yellow-toothed piano, if you stood outside the dining-room window and listened. Matches being struck, the first dishes bubbling in the suds and tinkling on the wall racks, somewhere, faintly, a phonograph playing. And then as the evening changed the hour,  at house after house, on the twilight streets, under the immense oaks and elms, on shady porches, people would begin to appear, like those figures who tell good or bad weather in rain-or-shine clocks."



"(Summer) began on a morning such as this when a boarder, a nephew, a cousin, a son or a grandson came out on the lawn below and moved in consecutively smaller quadrangles north and east and south and west with a clatter of rotating metal through the sweet summer grass."






"A darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible."











"'My gosh, if you're going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would've talked about next month, the month after!'

'It's just, if I didn't see those windows until today, what else did I miss? And what about all the things I did see here in town? Will I be able to remember them when I go away?'"





"And last of all, the children, who had been off squinting their way through a last hide-and-seek or kick-the-can, panting, glowing, would sickle quietly back like boomerangs along the soundless lawn, to sink beneath the talking talking talking of the porch voices which would weigh and gentle them down.........

"Books had instant replay 

long before televised sports."           

                                 ~Bern Williams

FROM "DANDELION WINE"

I THINK I should buy myself a copy of Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine". In my raggedy  book in which I write quotations when I'm reading, there are several words I've written down from that volume and yet I don't own the book. Years ago, when the state of California put together a basic reading list for the public schools, they listed "Dandelion Wine" as science fiction which I would contest. I'd consider it a memoir, but then I only had a year and a half of higher learning.

From time to time I'm going to share with you some of what's in that coming-apart red book of mine.

"When you meet a dragon that has eaten a swan, do you guess by the few feathers left around the mouth? That's what it is.......a body like this is a dragon, all scales and folds. So the dragon ate the white swan.

 I haven't seen her for years. I can't even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. She's safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasn't changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I'll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries!


 Or I'll swim in the lake or I'll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I'm in this old and ruined dragon. I'm the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming."
                                                                Ray Bradbury
                                                          "Dandelion Wine"

P.S. The words echo some of the things I'm feeling these days.

                                                           

AUTUMNAL EQUINOX

I REALIZE YOU'VE SEEN this picture before and there's little doubt but that you'll see it again if I'm here in the autumn of 2012. It's my favorite of our collection of fall photos.

To be honest, Spring is my favorite season of the year, with all the opening buds and resurrection of plant life, but next I would choose autumn even though there's a note of melancholy to it. Best of all is that first night when it's cool enough to reach down and pull up a blanket. I love that.

This morning when we were leaving our apartment to meet friends for breakfast, we found two bags on the doorknob. You see only one here because I staged it. Four times a year we experience this, with each equinox.





This year's card read:

inside was a large, nut-encrusted muffin.

At the same time last year this is what we discovered on our doorknob:

It pleases me  when people commemorate the seasons this way. Celebration should be a daily thing, methinks. There's always something to pay tribute to. Not that I always do it, but when it happens, it's a wondrous thing.

Young Son Tim is helping a friend move today so his usual Sunday visit was moved to Saturday. I needed a few things from the market. Mr. Bob declined our invitation to join us, preferring to take a nap at home. I waited in the car while Tim ran in to Trader Joe's to get the few things on my list which did not include the mini pumpkin he proudly showed me. He was moved to get it for me in celebration of autumn. That's my boy!

"Oh how we love pumpkin season.  You did know this gourd-ish squash has its own season, right?  Winter, Spring, Summer, Pumpkin.... We anxiously anticipate it every year."                                                       

                  Trader Joe's Fearless Flyer, October 2010