Measuring the sun

When I was a child, my grandmother measured the seasons by where the sun rose on our hill, the long ridge served as a fulcrum. In summer, it rose over the big rock to the north, and in winter over the tall pines along the fence line. In this way, we measured the seasons using the natural world, not man-made monuments. I was fascinated by the way sunlight raced along the tiles by the front door. Ours was an old house that kept to the old way, with the house aligned to the cardinal directions. So the morning sun shone through the front door, like a portal, or one of the gates of Stonehenge. We even had a big rock, a knob of limestone, or a chert reefer, perhaps blueschist sticking out like a menhir. She carried the old ways with her, the stones circles of her childhood landscape conflated with portals of time in the new world. I was an odd child, always measuring the world by criteria I didn’t quite understand. One morning, I got the idea to measure how the fast the rising sun over the ridge rose, so with my plastic ruler, I measured the speed between sunlight on tiles versus the advancing shadow. Each line on the ruler was a two-minute marker. I had half the equation but not the other half. In that moment, I realized how the shadows of a sundial worked, and suddenly I was connected to time in a timeless manner. Past and future fell away until there was only time present.

1/17/24 Write On! with Nancy Woo