Feeling the Weight of Time
Today I’m feeling the weight of time.
I glimpsed myself in the bank’s overhead monitor
and saw not an older woman with graying roots
and eyebrows in bad need of waxing
but a younger version with two
dark brown ponytails at a family picnic,
remembered trail rides on a summer afternoon
and snorkeling around Buck Island over 30 years ago.
Yesterday we bought America The Beautiful
senior passes, good for a life-time.
(They offered—we didn’t ask.)
We could have shared one,
but they were only $10 apiece, so we got two,
doubled our lives.
Last night at Lester’s Diner, in the third booth,
an older woman was eating fried chicken.
She was alone, but I noticed the thin silver ring
on the fourth finger of her left hand.
I told D I admired that she braved
the traffic alone while I’m still
anxious in the light.
She twisted in her seat to better see
the commotion outside her window.
The rest of us were curious but continued
eating our spinach pies and rice puddings.
Three police cars had stopped,
blue lights strobing.
Then an ambulance sirened past,
made a U-turn on Atlantic and
parked in front of the diner.
A waitress stepped outside and returned
to tell us all a woman was on the ground,
hit by a car in the intersection.
None of us heard a sound.
We paid our bill and left the back way.
Later I told D how, when I lined up his shoes
in the closet that morning
—the dress loafers in black and brown,
the gray flip-flops that slap against his feet
and drive me crazy—
I told him how for some reason it struck me then
that one of us would be left alone.
He said he hoped it’s not him because
those few months when we were apart were enough.
Then he removed the wall clock that had slowed
and turned its hands ahead.
That is such a sobering thought. We survived all our other life fears only to be confronted by yet another fear of loss. Age has a way of focusing quite sharply at times the inevitable.. unimaginable , that fear , that loss you speak of .Till now i have done my best to not think of it .. this is your fault …lol ..perhaps i can channel this into appreciating more than ever every moment that is left …. thanks for the nudge/ reminder …
My sister likes to remind me that *everything* is my fault. So I can shoulder this, too. 😉
Sorry. Not sorry?
Oh, I understand this. Somehow I never imagined this season, but here we are. And the days spin by, and we sometimes see our own mortality clearly. It reminds me always of hope and a life so filled with grace.
Here we are. And we’re not alone. Love you, Linda.
What a beautiful, rich, and thoughtful piece of writing!
Thank you so much, Linda. Some of the best words a writer can hear. xo
It always amazes me that the momentous seems to bear down on us in the routine activities of life — eating in a restaurant, straightening our shoes, or checking email and finding these words in my inbox.
Blessings, Sandra.
Oh, Michelle. Let’s make a pact to be grateful for and attentive to the routine activities of life. Thank you for coming by again today.
This one really sobered me up! Our lives are but a vapor and that becomes more apparent every day. Thank you for your thought provoking and challenging insights. Blessed Thanksgiving!
Hi Sophia. It’s so nice to see you here. You are right about our lives being a vapor. It’s hard to remember that in the everyday hard things. I’m praying we remember to give thanks for every moment. A blessed Thanksgiving to you, too.
I have read two or three poems of late on a similar theme. Kind of makes me nervous if I’m honest to have them stacking up like that. When this one slipped in my inbox this morning, I read it and I was undone. I was also grateful for the way you lived that day and recorded it with just the right details, then handed it to me gently so I would remember to live this day. And I have.
Hello, dear Dea. I know what you mean about those sacred stackings. I always wonder, too, if they are sometimes there to prepare me for something unpleasant. But maybe they are just reminders for us to pay attention and remember to live each day to its fullest, to scratch the small irritants and then let them alone. Happy Thanksgiving, friend.
Well done…
This is an all too familiar road. Now, I think, when we re-read the lines, we’ll wish we’d have left the hands of the clock, where they were, running slow.
Or stopped. Our grandfather clock case is in storage separate from the works. Time standing still. If only…