On Time

By Sparrow • November 2021

1.
I live in the town of Phoenicia, in the Catskill Mountains of New York. From my living room I can see the Esopus Creek, which is about a hundred feet wide. It is named for the Esopus tribe of Native Americans, whose descendants live on reservations in Wisconsin and Ontario.

Sometimes I stand on the shores of the Esopus in the morning and gaze at the water. Watching a creek is like watching time. The longer you watch, the more water you see. Time is definitely fluid, not solid. You can’t cut off a piece of time and haul it around in your truck.

Sparrow

Correspondence

In Sparrow’s thought-provoking essay “On Time,” he writes, “When I was a child, before the existence of digital clocks, time was circular. The hands of a clock spun in circles. . . . Now time is almost universally a number.”

I, too, prefer looking at circular clock faces, which tell me not only what time it is, but what time it isn’t.

Linnea Lundwall North Kingstown, Rhode Island

More Letters

What Do You Think? Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We'd love to hear about it. Send Us A Letter