This week, time and I have a complicated relationship.
Each morning since Sunday, my head’s laid heavy as stone as the radio clicks on, and I only rise long enough to look over my husband’s sleeping body to the alarm and reset it. Each day, unable to get up as early as I want, I’ve cursed daylight savings time.
I like extra light as much as the next guy, but I’m not so sure this artificial clock switching is worth it. The concept that creates many a sleepless night and cranky morning child. The concept that originated hundreds of years ago by Benjamin Franklin, in an effort to save candles (and probably avoid the fires caused by them). The forced change that increases the incidence of heart attacks and other health problems due to the stress on confused bodies.
These facts are courtesy of me (#1) and my daughter and her fifth grade class (#2 and 3) and, if I weren’t so tired I’d probably Google it, but I tend to trust my girl on these things (her memory for factoids rivals that of her father).
For an early riser like me — one who gets most of her writing done in the morning hours — a 5 o’clock wakeup suddenly becomes 4:00, and no one who is not an insomniac or catching an airplane or tending to a sick child or putting on a uniform or scrubs wakes then.
I want to fight the hands we circle forward, but it just is.
As I type this, a smoke detector chirps. The smoke detector with a ten-year battery inside — the one that’s been checked and tested a dozen times in the past few weeks and seems fine until the early morning — chirps every 30 seconds. Twice a minute.
Over and over again.
Right now, I’m certainly feeling the time.
This week, I read more of Madeleine L’Engle’s words about moments that transcend time and move beyond the chronological of our everyday — those places where time holds suspended like a man standing on water.
On Monday afternoon, I held Lala on my lap and told her the story of The Velveteen Rabbit, pulling from memory and adding my own parts about the rabbit becoming real and returning to the little boy by climbing the shrubbery and rap-tap-rapping against the boy’s window with his true thumping rabbit paws.
Lala sat motionless, turning her head to look into my eyes as I spoke of the rabbit’s new twitching nose and cotton fluff tail and of his joyful reunion with the boy he loved. I thought of the line (quoted by L’Engle) from Our Town: “Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me…it goes so fast we don’t have time to look at one another…”
So here we are in that place — she and I — in this land where time stops and words float through air to rounded ears, settling in a memory with these eyes truly seeing the other.
Even now, as I write about this moment with my girl, her long lashes curved up toward my face, the smell of her hair in my nose and the long nap she took afterward, her nearly-real Lambie snuggled next to her cheek, I don’t hear the chirping of the smoke detector.
In this moment, recounting the gift outside of time, everything else stops.
Linking up today with Emily Wierenga at Imperfect Prose.
Connecting through the power of stories written, spoken and lived
“Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me…it goes so fast we don’t have time to look at one another…”
Isn’t this the rub of all life?
I’ve known a great deal of this (holy) thing on my travels of late.
Beautiful, Ashley.
I do think this is so much of it. We struggle to slow to truly see. Thanks for your presence here, my friend.
Beautiful post, Ashley.
So good to see you here, Elizabeth.
Oh Ashley you tell story so well I feel I am sitting at Starbucks with you and hanging on your every beautiful word. We will all recover from this debacle of daylight savings time but darned if we aren’t all a hot mess over here too.
Oh, friend. Don’t I wish we could sit in our hot messiness over a few lattes? Hot mess isn’t so bad with a hot cup in your hand and a precious friend across the table.
Daylight savings…every year it causes me such grief! It was worse when the kids were baby. I feel the exact way you do in the mornings…though you got me beat by an hour. Was toying about blogging about it..but now I don’t have to.
Cheers,
Leah
I’m going to pop over there, Leah, and see if you did end up writing about the dreaded springing forward. :) So you’re mountain time? And I agree! With babies, the change was miserable. Their poor little bodies just don’t know what to do.
Dear Ashley
Your words about looking at your daughter for just a minute as if you are really seeing her, stands as a lesson for us all! In this frantically busy day and age, we do not look one another properly in the eye and miss so much thorn bushes burning with the glory of our Pappa around us! Oh, that we will have eyes not only to look, but to truly see!!! Thanks.
Much love, dear friend
Mia
Yes, looking right in the eye and looking for the miracles all around. That’s right — that we would truly see! Thank you, dear Mia.
Ashley…there is something spell-binding, so invitational – about the way a story unfolds in your care. “Draw Near” seems the well-earned name for this place…draw closer, there’s a gift here for you, each and every time. You begin with this fabrication of time & saving light – and before we know it, we’ve been gentled down the road. And now we’re with you and your littlest long-lashed girl, on the couch, looking deeply into one another’s eyes, seeing the life and light there. So very sweet, so very beautiful. Really touched me. Thank you for this place.
Wow, Mama, what a huge compliment. It was my tucked away hope that this place would be one where readers would want to draw near — not just to my stories, but to the places where God touches these everyday blessed moments. So thank you, Mama. Thank you.
How you did this, spinning a story of such a timeless moment from daylight savings frustrations… I wasn’t prepared for it. And that, I think, is the mark of a gifted storyteller. I love how you pull sacred moments out of the ordinary.
They are everywhere, aren’t they? xoxo
How I love to visit your words here, friend, for they are always so wrapped in truth and love and life and big and little things and glory. The clock may think it has won in these first few weeks of daylight savings but you, my friend, have the victory. You took a chunk of time and pulled it out of its orbit and lived in it for all it was worth.
Just keep doing that.
I finally beat the clock!! Thank you, dear Holly. I truly savor your words. Bless you and thank you for all your encouragement.
A very tender writing here….really rich and lovely Ashley….again
Thank you, Kelly. I so appreciate your presence here.
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