a place without time :: essays papers

a place without time From the mountains, you can see it coming. Time sits on the horizon like rain clouds, holding out. In the cities you carry it around in your pocket. Time is organized around where you have to be. You dash blindly around busy corners, always racing against it. But in the mountains, the world sits on the horizon, refusing to move. Before I ever went to the city, I used to know what that meant. Now I found myself trying to remember, waking up every morning to look at the mountains and see what they held. If there were clouds there, you knew there might be rain. But I knew there was something to wait for. I could watch time coming. I returned home because I was still longing for the clouds to roll over the skyline and the water to flow from the hills. It was if time was losing her memory, as the city had made me lose mine. My father used to say, when he would look down at his feet, "they look the same, but the ground is different." I don't know if he was forgetting things too, or remembering them all so well. My father carried it too, in his pocket, so he wouldn't forget. When people asked about it, he would bring it out and laugh. My sister and I needed our father to hold together our memories, to hold together the world before we were born. The world before our time. Where I lived, there were smashed bugs on the windshield, skittish coyotes, and, of course, trout. My dad remembered the river where he taught me about the sands of time, and how to fish. He said that in the days before me there had been fish the size of small children willing to take what ever gift God, or my dad, had to offer. So when I came home, I brought my dad to that stream, looking for a cure. Anyone who lives long enough begins to be infected by a search for time. You look for it everywhere because it is life. After a while, you can feel it in the ground beneath your feet, in the creeks in the back canyons, in the clouds over the hills that may never come back.