the method of marking time

The last nine months passed in a pleasant rhythm.

morning|afternoon|evening|night

breakfast|smoke-o|lunch|afternoon tea|dinner|drink

summer|summer|summer|summer

solitude|instruction|work|rest

cool|warmth|heat|heat|warmth

arrive|love|goodbyes

Returning to this busy land meant remembering the more standard measures of days, hours, minutes.  After such long months of only the most haphazard frames of time thrown together much like the amateur fences that we built, it was hard to imagine this mathematical chart of chronology.  As a celebration of returning to days that were busy enough to merit marking people's names, locations and times down, I decided that it was time to purchase myself a calendar.

I had a general idea of what this calendar would be: small enough to carry around so that I could reference it quickly, have a protective cover of some sort, ideally have both monthly and weekly calendars with lots of space for me to write things down, be not too terribly expensive and not too terribly disfigured.  The synchronicity of the beginning of the school year gave me hope that the back-to-school market would be saturated with calendars for all those organization-hopefuls.

There were plenty of calendars of all different shapes, sizes, and prices filled with unnecessary pages and doodads and stamped all over with different brand names.  I quickly gave up on the idea on finding the perfect calendar and decided that it was much more likely that I would find success by altering an existing calendar.  My purchases consisted of some vellum paper with a thistley, black silhouette and a pleasantly bright yellow piece of card from the trendy scrapbooking section of Michael's, and a small calendar that I found on sale at Target.

It was so simple to create this perfect calendar.  The most challenging part was the idea.  All that remained was cutting the vellum with an exacto-knife, cutting the card, and then punching holes in all the same places as the circle binding and replacing the generic color-dot cover.  Suddenly I have the calendar that I wanted all along, and that fond association brings joy to me every time that an excuse arises for me to pull it out of my bag.

And now I am filling those pages with the names of the incredible people that are slowly being introduced into my life, with the new responsibilities that I've hoped for, the classes I've been yearning to take.

Now even the marking of time brings me joy in ways it never had before.