“Timepieces” is a series of new writing set to exact minutes of the day. Together, these moments form a portrait of life, one minute at a time.
In today’s Timepiece, Yardena Schwersky writes into the disorientation of Daylight Savings, when the clock changes but the sky seems to be keeping its own time.
I SPEND MY AFTERNOONS sitting on my back porch. I read. I write. I check emails. I open the Merlin app to identify the birds singing in the trees. I watch the pollinators flit among the wild patch of Spanish needle and tasselflower on the side of the yard. I listen to the leaves speak to each other through the mouth of the wind.
In the early afternoon, there are no shadows. The light blankets everything evenly, without dimension. But as the sun falls, certain portions of scrub are illuminated while others are thrown into darkness. The bare trunk of the Brazilian pepper tree in my neighbor’s yard begins to glow. At first, it is silvery-white, but as the sun continues its descent, the bark becomes yellow. It drips with golden light. I think it is after six, but we’ve just sprung forward and lost an hour. It is 7:04. But the hour is only different if you think about time the way humans do, as a way to place ourselves within an exacting frame. To the Brazilian pepper tree, numbers on a clock are meaningless. It knows only that the sun is shining from its last angle of the day. It feels the air cooling and it sighs into the coming night.
I stop what I’m doing to watch the changing shades of the Brazilian pepper. I hate this tree. It is invasive, dominating the natives through sheer force of will. It crowds out the longleaf pine, which still tries valiantly to hold its ground even as the Brazilian pepper drops black beads of misfortune that will take root and multiply. In the days of old, fire would have solved this problem. It would destroy the invaders and replenish the soil, inviting native grasses and rare flora to reemerge from the ashes. This once-great pine forest was cleared for orange groves decades ago. Now, even the oranges are gone, replaced by houses and asphalt. I don’t want to hate humanity for what we’ve done to this place, so instead, I hate this tree.
And yet, this tree is golden. This horrible Brazilian pepper is precious metal brought to life by the sunset. I am enamored with my enemy. I rip its offspring from the ground in protest, but my eyes feast on it all the same. Both of these truths exist together. It is after six. It is after seven. The number is irrelevant. The golden light is the truth.
Later, when the sun finally buries itself in the horizon, the Brazilian pepper tree turns grey and becomes a foe once more, dull and impenetrable. The sky dims but for one cloud, a cumulus giant still scattering the last of the sun’s gaze. The gold shifts from tree to cloud, retreating farther from my grasp. The cloud shines through the still-whispering leaves. Now, it is nearly seven. Or rather, it is nearly eight. Time shifts at humanity’s whim. Lose an hour. Gain it back again. But the time doesn’t matter; only the light matters. The gold continues to flee, but pink remains in the growing darkness. It softens the sky. It softens my heart. All of this has happened before and will happen again, although never in quite the same way. This single pink cloud settles into my consciousness. I think it will remain there every evening from now on. The clock can say whatever it wants, but all the sunsets I’ve seen are layered behind my eyes, existing in conversation with one another. It is all happening at once, forever.
YARDENA SCHWERSKY is from Florida’s Gulf Coast. She writes the Substack Letters on Being.
At the heart of AUTHOR & CO. is a love of reading, so we create tools that bring literature into everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.
Currently, our collection includes Author Clock—the clock that tells time through quotes from literature, and now Author Forecast, which pairs real-time weather conditions with passages from books.
Visit our website to learn more.
 | A guest post by
|
Introduced, not invasive, species. By terming them invasive as if they tore up their roots willingly and transported themselves to lay waste to foreign lands is just us absolving ourselves of the havoc we have wrought.
That aside, this is a beautiful piece of writing; prose that is almost poetic. Lovely!
The bend of space-time tells matter how to move, and matter tells space-time how to bend...language tells thought how to move, and thought tells language how to bend. - Maria Popova