“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it;
but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin
current slides away, but eternity remains.”
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
Today the Grackles reappeared I would say returned but some I
am sure have been with us all summer. Typically we see small flocks in the
spring and again in the fall, gleaming black metallic knights with their bronze
and violet feathers, the sunlight reflected a different spectrum with every
turn and pirouette. This year a family also appeared in midsummer with their
squalling chicks reflecting every phase of the transition from callow youth to
adult. I have seen the large winter
flocks in Charleston but here they are more of a beautiful novelty and when I
think of the house in Calgary they will have a strong seasonal association for
me. I find that living in the city I often experience the seasons more through
memory and art than through my day to day reality so the Grackle today are
welcome guests.
The advent of fall here has started me thinking about the
seasons. One trend that has saddened me lately is the calls for year round
schools. As I am neither, parent or educator I see this not from a practical stance
but through the rather romantic lens of childhood. As adults we live
increasingly in a 24 7 world. Technology allows those of us who live in the
cities of the developed world to even out the seasonal effects of climates on
products, housing even the cycle of day and night. A winter vacation can be taken
in the tropics a shift worker can start at midnight and go home to sleep with
the dawn. It is a reality we live in but
one I would like to spare children, so much of the school I remember revolved
around the seasons, our art projects of cutting out pumpkins and Christmas trees,
the gathering and preserving of fallen leaves for science projects, even the
stories in our readers and the pageants we performed often had a seasonal
theme.
It is hard to imagine that these seasonal pursuits with have
the same resonance for children that
live in the same world as their parents, where time off is the same two weeks squeezed in here and there for practically and convenience. The world we used
to inhabit was a thing of grand sweeping gestures not a world anchored to the cheese
paring of time.
“February
and there are Valentines for everyone for once.
Easter
eggs, paper tulips, it is spring and change is in the air.
And
in the summer you ran thru an endless twilight
until the street lights
called you home.”
from Days of Construction
Paper and Macaroni
Guy
“Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time
would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my
hand,
In the
moon that is always rising,
Nor
that riding to sleep
I should
hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the
childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his
means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea. “
Fern Hill
Dylan Thomas
