‘Tis the season to stop and smell the daphne, rich and perfumey but not overpowering, maybe because it’s dispersed outdoors, or maybe the cool air filters it. If I’m walking in the neighborhood or across campus, suddenly there it is, a shifting cloud of deliciousness from an invisible shrub, a siren song of scent. Am I the only one who stops, sniff-sniff-sniff detecting–detective–Watson, I think it’s coming from that garden over there. . .? We have a gradual spring, bit by bit; I measure it by flowers more than leaves, because the lichen on the trees means even trees that lose their leaves are green year round. I know it will keep raining, or start raining again, and I know some people don’t count it as spring until the rain is really over for the year. But I mostly count by daffodils–the very earliest, and then the early, and then finally those in my yard. So far I’ve resisted the temptation to steal a bulb or two from beside the jogging trail, where there’s a clump of ultra-early, loud, fluffy yellow blossoms I wait for every year. I should probably run with a chaperone.
Clocks spring forward tonight (or tomorrow morning, but who really thinks of 2 am as “tomorrow”?). Newspapers will be thick with cartoon drawings of pocket watches with wings–time flies, but the image of that old-timey watch springs eternal. Some members of my family are already distressed, mourning that borrowed hour lost in anticipation, or loaned, a lien on a leisurely Sunday morning sometime in fall.
The light will be wrong, we will have overslept without intending to–not luxury, but loss. And for a week or so, people will say “it feels so late” or “still feels early,” the way a day will just feel like a Thursday, even early in the week. There’s a Thursdayness to time, or a Mondayness, that can seem to inhere even though it is a system of our own invention, a malleable convention that might be adjusted–we could split the days in half, say, finally get not eight days a week but fourteen: Monday, Monmoreday; Tuesday, Tuesmoreday. . . and so forth. Like games played with school schedules or work shifts, attempts to pretend instructional time is growing, not shrinking, or that part time isn’t really half time, but only approaching it, that ever-receding horizon of infinity.
But who would do the math? Keep straight which day was which, and when the loan must be repaid, and whether we had sprung back or fallen forward? I remember the mustard yellow folders that held each separate chapter in high school chemistry, and the stern, fierce teacher explaining unit analysis again and again. You could lose a lot of points if you weren’t alert to your unit analysis.
Turns out she was right. Only there are more units than she intimated, more slices and dices in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in any lazy misquotation, more ways to skin a cat or watch a cookie crumble or find the glass half empty or half full.
Time to stop and smell the daphne.