Tuesday, March 27, 2012

For me, the passage of time generally manifests itself as the mess of weeks in between holidays, and I think this skewed perspective grew out of checking off the days on the grade school calendar. January, for instance, isn’t the start of the year per se. Instead, it’s the month where you get a day off–to commemorate the sacrifices for civil rights by sleeping in–a mere three weeks after the “Fun Zone,” the stretch of food and merriment known traditionally as November and December. The rest of the year is decidedly lean, with your Labor Days and Memorial Days and Independence Days sprinkled like oases. And then, you have your droughts: March and August, grim slogs of endurance.

I can’t be the only one who perceives the contours of the year like this, right? I mean, I do pop open Outlook every morning to make sure I materialize in the meetings I’ve accepted, at the prescribed hours, but that’s about as granular a view as I take. Otherwise, I picture this haze of days, with Good Friday as a beacon of light, just over a week from now. After that, nothing.

There is something else that helps me parse the days, though. Whenever the mercury rises to the 60s, and nature expands the colors it has on offer, and sunlight insists on overstaying its welcome, I can sense something’s amiss, calendars and day planners be damned. I also notice an influx of allergies, bugs, ice cream trucks, warm blue skies, even a little hope. I think they call it spring.