My cells enliven at once feeling the soft resonance of metal against metal. Grooves turning hands. Memories springing to life. Not mine to remember. A cardboard box. A clock left in pieces. Brought back to life under skilled hands. I reach out fingertips to touch sound long lost. To search for something far behind gears that have found new breath. Whirring. Signifying. Soothing and rhythmic chimes that last resonated on eardrums of generations long forgotten. Songs of old marking last breaths and long silences. Unfelt tears rush back through longed for spaces. Belonging to time before me. Waking the dead with reverence. Beneath the soil I walk unceasingly where generations are lined like soldiers. Ancestors who hold back the veil of time herself so my footsteps can fall above them on sun drenched soil. Rhythmic in nature. And all marking in rhythm, sweet and sorrowful time.
Last night when I couldn’t sleep I opened an email that holds a short video clip of a clock that has been newly brought back to life. The sound of the chimes amazed me, and tears sprang at once and were sent streaming down my cheeks and to my pillow below. I tiptoed out of the bedroom walking around known squeaky floorboards to sit on the stairs where I watched on repeat the most amazing grace as it sang to me over and over again of long forgotten memories.
My best guess is that this clock last marked time in the 1950’s, or maybe before. Generations ago. I wonder why she had been boxed and put away? What events did she mark time for in my father’s young life and his parents before? Who knew this sound well of the faces who stare back from curled edged photos? And, why is the whirring oddly familiar in the same way a particular stretch of land can be known to be one’s own in an ancestral way? I am mesmerized by the chimes and their comfort. And, I wonder what this very sound will mark time for in my own life? When will my eyes turn to its bright face so that I may have some sort of companion marking new moments both tragic and spectacular?
I wish she had walked with me through time before now. To be the background for my life like a sibling who holds shared story. It would have been lovely to glance up at her over my book in the evening, and to hear her shouting at me from the next room to help me rush out the door. To sing to me while I stared out over moonlit water, unable to sleep. Someone or something to represent the continual. A shared life. To stand beside me as I sat vigil at the bedside of those I loved while they left earth quite impossibly. To comfort me in the days of fallow when I willed time to stop. I wonder too will she be there to remind me of something bigger, and yet unknown to me as I lay dying like Falkner’s Addie. And, far away will I hear here fading to me as time herself stands still.
In gratitude to those who have gone before me – the men and women whose ingenuity brought this clock and her makings into being in the first place in and around the turn of the 19th century. To the person who sold this clock to someone I never had the blessing to meet, but whose blood runs through my veins. I pray for those who had chance to hear her and be accompanied by her when she last sat ticking. And, I am thankful to those who have been the steps along the way in bringing her back to life in recent time, including Dawn, Paul, David, Jane, Lee, and especially Brent, who with patience and skill has gifted me a piece of family history I never knew I missed so much through time.
