Small ways of stopping time

I’m troubled by time. And fascinated by it, too.

The steady, quickening march of it as you get older.

What it is, what it isn’t, how it works; the way it can actually seem to stop and start again.

I know it doesn’t, really, but if you’re lucky enough to have a place you get to only occasionally, you can find something close to stasis. A land that time forgot.

Some things continue unabated. I know that if the weather warms enough, even in winter, at least one or two dazed blue flies will awaken on the sill in the sun-warm and stroll stupidly about, too weak to fly.

I know that, whether I’m there or not, ladybugs will appear inside somehow and walk their circles on the window glass. Sow beetles will march setting off across the terra incognita of broad, open floorboards.

Grass will grow, trees will shed leaves and sometimes branches. In the kitchen and the living room, the clocks will turn until the batteries die, sometimes relentlessly ignoring things like daylight savings time.

But many things will stay the same. Books set down half-read ago will have their bookmarks in exactly the same place as when you set them down, even if that was months ago.

The white kettle — safely emptied so that the water won’t freeze inside — will be on the same burner. The wood box, always left full, will always still be full.

Boots and shoes will line up and toe the wall; jackets will wait to shrug onto shoulders. We always leave the dish rack full of last time’s clean dishes when we leave — it makes coming back into the place easier somehow.

All of that changes when you get there. Time starts from what seems like a dead stop. The fridge, plugged in again, marches through its sighs and complaints; the wood stove, lit, mutters to life with ticks and tings.

There are voices in the house again, even though when you first get there, it’s hard to speak above a whisper because silence seems like the order of the day, the week, the month. The wood box empties and someone sets off across the yard to the shed to fill it again.

Time comes for us all.

But I’ll let you in on a small secret: I cheat.

Among all the things that I might lift and use and move, among the shovels and saws and screwdrivers and paint cans, there are some things that I almost religiously leave alone — or, if I do pick them up or use them, that I am careful to always put back in exactly the same place.

I mean, it doesn’t really change anything in this universe’s fabric; the fact that there’s a shovel in the root cellar that has always been propped against the same floor post, a shovel that has been there so long that it wears a dappled coating of rust that looks like the skin of a living thing, doesn’t change the fact that today drains into tomorrow like a tub drains water. A bow saw on a coat hook: three found axe heads in a line. A claw hammer, hung on the wall one nail by its claw.

I find myself travelling around the house and shed like a pilgrim looking for touchstones. I don’t even think about it, this rosary of anchors. But it’s incredibly reassuring when things are exactly, precisely, timelessly where they are supposed to be; that they have stayed, waited, stopped completely.

And how, as it rushes by, you want the world to do that.

You get to pretend for a moment that time doesn’t run through your hands.

Then, of course, it does. Russell Wangersky’s column appears

in SaltWire publications across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@thetelegram.com

Twitter: @wangersky