A Time for Small Gifts
BY BRETT F. BRALEY-PALKO
Image by Gerd Altmann/Pixabay.
Something extraordinary has happened to me: I no longer tell time the way I used to. In fact, my entire relationship with time has changed. Days and weeks and months and seasons were once dominoes. They would fall in the order they were stacked. Now, I see my days more akin to a skipping stone. Sometimes it ripples for what feels like forever. Other times it sinks on the first go.
I lost my job February 29 of this year. It was Leap Day, which has always had an imaginary quality to it. That is the last date I can tell with any confidence. We went into lockdown the next week.
Since then, I have been telling time in other ways. For instance, I knew it was late Spring because half our chickens went into their yearly moult. The other half have theirs around Christmas - which is very unlucky for them. I knew when we had peaked at Summer because of the chickens, too. They didn’t always lay as regularly as they had the week before. Less daylight means less eggs. We had hit the Solstice and I didn’t even know it.
Chickens are the best timekeepers we have. I’ve owned a Rhode Island Red and a Rolex. You can guess which one I trust nowadays.
But the others on the farm do well, too. I must give them their credit. In late July our barn cat gave birth to a litter of kittens. I know it was July because they’re toddlers now, big limbed and running around my feet. They do that at ten weeks. All the math I’ve done recently has worked backwards from these kittens. It must have been September when they started eating solid foods. It must have still been August when the mother cat let me touch her for the first time. We were all a little skittish on how we were going to live together. We’re at twelve weeks and still trying to figure it out.
And if I need to know a time of day, I look to the dogs for that. They wake me up at seven. Elsa, our collie, likes to check on the yard around ten for dastardly squirrels and mocking crows. We eat lunch and then they nap around two, or sometimes four. We all are in bed by nine. It’s their routine and I just follow it. There are three of them and only one of me.
I don’t keep track of time the same way I used to for myself, either. I stopped getting haircuts, so the every-four-weeks rule no longer applies. My nails I bite when I start thinking about the world. My beard I shave when it itches and I can’t take it anymore. There has been no rhythm to how I react to my body. It is working independently from me. It goes forward while I am stuck somewhere between February 29 and eternity.
This year has been a time of small gifts in its own way. I have not become distracted with email notifications and work calls. I have had the time to sit and really look around me. I have put my trust into those whose only communication is barks and chirps and newborn purrs. I am learning that this has been something to appreciate more than it has been something to fear. I am not sure what day of the week it is, but the regularity of collecting a few eggs in the morning in the barn has comforted me more than anything else these last few months.
BRETT F. BRALEY-PALKO is a writer living in rural Pennsylvania with a flock of hens, a few spoiled dogs, and a couple barn cats who hang around. He is currently working on his first novel.