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I love this, and it is, in a way, how I tell time.
I remember vividly in spring 2020, when everything had shut down and there felt like there was no time—or nothing to mark it, I watched the daffodils bloom and the rhubarb leaf out and the forsythia burst into a fountain of yellow. It's how time progressed, and in a time when nothing was normal and I wasn't sure what was normal any more, I'd notice the rhubarb sending out it's first leaf and my Facebook memories would show me within a day, my own wonder and delight in that over a decade.
There's an expression in Swedish along these lines that I adore. It is “Closed between hägg [a kind of flower that blooms before lilacs do] and lilac”. (”Stängt mellan hägg och syren”.) The story is that a shoemaker posted this on his door, to make it clear to his customers when he had gone on vacation and when he was coming back…
I love this, and it is, in a way, how I tell time.
I remember vividly in spring 2020, when everything had shut down and there felt like there was no time—or nothing to mark it, I watched the daffodils bloom and the rhubarb leaf out and the forsythia burst into a fountain of yellow. It's how time progressed, and in a time when nothing was normal and I wasn't sure what was normal any more, I'd notice the rhubarb sending out it's first leaf and my Facebook memories would show me within a day, my own wonder and delight in that over a decade.
There's an expression in Swedish along these lines that I adore. It is “Closed between hägg [a kind of flower that blooms before lilacs do] and lilac”. (”Stängt mellan hägg och syren”.) The story is that a shoemaker posted this on his door, to make it clear to his customers when he had gone on vacation and when he was coming back…