I am back in a nation who believes in daylight savings, so for a few weeks I didn’t need electric light bulbs while shuffling about the apartment from sink to cereal bowl to coat to shoes, and I didn’t need to peer across the park on heightened awareness to see if I walked alone or if someone shared the sidewalk – other than the omnipresent rabbits and squirrels.
But daylight savings cannot lengthen the time the sun wishes to shine on us, and as days shorten, we have slipped back into the eerie darkness of mornings, where each step is careful and each street light is abuzz with nervous activity. The trees wave their thin arms and bony fingers about in the wind with longing.
Insomnia visited me last night and I can’t shake the feeling that there are more bureaucratic nightmares to accomplish than I have the mind and hands to tackle. Times like this, I wish I could leap ahead into my sixties, tug on a pale green elbow-worn sweater and settle into the upholstered chair of my grandmother Lucille. To be her as I remember her, the one who had time to cook from scratch and make things with her hands, from malted milk shakes poured into blue, red and green aluminum cups to knitting neon-colored ponchos for her mousy-haired granddaughter. How lovely it would to be to have the time to create from what we discard rather than to create what we discard. It is a gift to be able to fold torn magazine pages into the skirts of angels.
