One minute of daylight gained; the sun set at 4:22 pm instead of 4:21 pm. I didn’t pay much attention to this incremental change, the beginning of what I will eventually experience as languid, indulgent daylight hours, warm evenings that never seem to darken completely.
One minute doesn’t seem like enough time to do anything, yet one minute is interminable when Netflix unexpectedly cuts out and I’m left watching the red bar painstakingly fill on the “Loading, please wait” black out screen. One minute of lounging under the covers on a day off is so much shorter than the one last minute before the bell rings and the professor shows no sign of slowing down. Perception is everything. Time doesn’t change, but it sure feels like it does.
Last night I was at a gathering where I had known people over the last 12 years. It was jarring to reconstruct the timeline. What was the year I moved here? When did I meet the party’s host? What year did I move in to the house? When did I move out? How long since I’ve seen this person and that? Twelve years is enough time that everyone has a slightly different life. People have changed partners, divorced, remarried, had a child (then a second child), had grandchildren, finished graduate degrees, stayed with partners, left jobs, moved, outlived beloved pets, started law suits, left graduate programs without degrees, gained weight, lost weight, cut hair, grown hair, colored hair, and all, apparently, are now gluten-free.
I found the only way to keep my sense of any accuracy in the timeline was to anchor time with the Fall when I was pregnant, or keep figuring out how old my son was during each event and then trying, with way more difficulty than subtraction usually causes, to figure out the year.
Right before those 12 years, I made a geographic change, and the resulting repercussions belied that I was living only 14 degrees latitude and 4 degrees longitude away from a former life. Every aspect of my known self was altered; soon after, I recovered my original sense of inner place. Since then, my timeline has only very small notches. The people in my life in the last 12 years are the same ones, even if they’ve changed alignment a time or two. I haven’t changed my diet since I gave up the fallacy that I could be vegetarian; a blip in my timeline that wasn’t destined to last. I haven’t given up gluten in any form, and certainly never intend to. I haven’t given up sarcasm, music, or the way I melt when I see a black Labrador puppy. My handwriting hasn’t improved, nor has my patience. I’m still allergic to cats, and my husband still reminds me of the depth of his sacrifice in trading a life with cats to his life with me. I still love Denzel Washington, The Princess Bride, the perfection of Austen’s Mr. Bennett handling his high-strung wife, the way two white roses can exude more beauty than a whole field of flowers.
I’ve had 12 years of winter solstices, 12 years of the gradual lengthening of light and time, 12 years of minutes that have gone unnoticed. I’d like to say that I’ll pay attention to tonight’s sundown at 4:22 pm today. But I’m just as likely to miss it. I might be watching a family movie (we’ve declared, with full gusto, that today is a stay-at-home day so we can all rest and enjoy a full winter break day off). Might be doing laundry. Might be writing. Might be listening to my son’s Katy Perry station on Pandora. Might be looking through the Williams Sonoma website wondering how I’ll spend last year’s gift card that I forgot I had and found when I was looking for a spare car key. I might be making dinner with animal proteins and gluten. I might be being sarcastic. For it is in each of these ways that I add minutes of lightness to my days, regardless of what the sun is doing out there.