Creating Helps to Mark Time
When she moved to her new apartment, my mother gave me one of her many 2020 calendars. I had forgotten to put it up. When we returned from France, I saw it laying on the table and decided now would be a good time to hang it in my kitchen. Later, when I went to check a date on it, I realized that I had opened it to the month of May. Maybe I had already imagined the two month hiatus in my life… So how is time measured when it seems to stand still?
For those of us who create, what we make marks time. So this week, I make some Easter bread from start to finish. With my fingers, I mix flour, yeast and water and, in a few hours, as I add eggs, sugar, butter and anise liqueur, I have a lovely rich dough. Its rise and fall soothes my mind. I cut then braid the soft, pliable strands then poke an egg into their folds and wait as the loaf puffs up. Slathered with egg wash, it’s ready for the final step in the oven. As it bakes, it releases its scents throughout the house. My day is no longer measured by hours. Instead, it follows the rhythm of baking and my focus on each step. Time passes as the dough rises to the top of the bowl, as I punch it down, as I braid and decorate it, as it bakes. Today’s creation culminates when it comes out of the oven and we take that first melt-in-your-mouth bite. It’s all in a day’s work.
A little further on up the road, Jim is also creating. For him, one day is a small measure in the birth of an instrument. A typical day there is measured by one coat of varnish or how much to carve away from a mandolin back. Each task he carries out is not measured in minutes but in an intuitive sense of when it is done. On this particular day, the final piece of the puzzle arrives in the noon mail: tuners for his almost completed pedal steel guitar. When I stop in at his shop to pick him up for our late afternoon walk at OxBow Park, a new sound fills my ears. The sweet notes of the pedal steel guitar slide through the air. Pedal steel number two is finished! I no longer know what day or what hour it is but right now, a new pedal steel has just taken wing. And it leaves me giddy.
After our walk, we head home. The finished loaf of bread sits on the table as I still hear the finished pedal steel’s twang in my ears. For a creature of habit who works well under deadlines and who likes closure, this has been a good day among all these open-ended ones. Life is still bubbling away and before I know it, it will be May.
