Child Time

 


Work in progress. My mother taught me to rug hook years ago and recently I’ve picked it up again. I simplified a favorite watercolor.


Vogue fabric moved! I was looking for some 100% wool to work on a tree in my rug hooking project and Joann’s had only one cream option, and everything else was a wool blend, which I don’t want. 

Micheal’s had a better selection but only online, so I wouldn’t have been able to work on my next piece of the rug for a week or two, so I thought of Vogue. They’ve always had a wonderful selection of fabrics. Indeed the sheer volume of what they have is what made me initially look for easier options. 

I know where Vogue Fabrics is in Evanston. I have been there many times. I thought I had been there in the last year or two. I only googled the address to see the fastest route. But google kept giving me directions that didn’t make sense. Left on Oakteon off of Ridge. NO, Vogue in on Main Street, Evanston.

I persisted. Google persisted. The dis-embodied lady kept re-rerouting me. I finally pulled over and asked the internet if Vogue had moved. Yes! Like in 2021!!!???

Where did time go? I was there looking for buttons just a little while ago . . . Wait that must have been before the pandemic. Really? Like almost five years ago?

Yep, time did something weird during the pandemic and I’m not entirely sure it’s acting normal even now. It’s flying, zipping around the world like Superman on a mission to speed me into the hereafter. The only tool I have to slow it down is Wonder. The same wonder that I so often jettison in favor of schedules and lists and marked-up calendars. Anything that gives me the illusion of control. But when I stop! and look around, I forget about what I should be doing and sit still in the timeless wonder of simply being.

I have always loved Buechner’s idea of Child Time vs. (Post-Eden) Adam and Eve time:

“What child, while summer is happening, bothers to think much that summer will end? What child, when snow is on the ground, stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless? It is by its content rather than its duration that a child knows time, by its quality rather than its quantity—happy times and sad times, the time the rabbit bit your finger, the time you had your first taste of bananas and cream, the time you were crying yourself to sleep when somebody came and lay down beside you in the dark for comfort. 

Childhood's time is Adam and Eve's time before they left the garden for good and from that time on divided everything into before and after. 

It is the time before God told them that the day would come when they would surely die with the result that from that point on they made clocks and calendars for counting their time out like money and never again lived through a day of their lives without being haunted somewhere in the depths of them by the knowledge that each day brought them closer to the end of their lives.” Frederick Buechner, Sacred Journey


I mostly live in Adam and Eve time, but ohhh how I long to exist in Child time forever. 

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