Describe A Clock

There is a hundred-plus-year-old, Mormon-pioneer-carried, wooden one on the mantel in which I must use a brass key to wind both sides--in together--careful not to overwind and even then, each day, time is lost and has to be settled each time the springs are wound.

I found it in the attic of a farmhouse we once lived in, outside of Spanish Fork, a stone’s throw from the sugar beet factory, the house had been in Nick’s family all of those years, built of blonde mud bricks in 1905, a passing hobo painted the wood grain, oxblood and milk, the look of oak on the sliding doors. The one room granary, a stable they’d birthed their five in became a tack shed after its erection.

Most of the time the clock sits as a relic and instead we dip down on screen to read what Google tells us.

This regulator was carefully laid in a box of yellowing newspapers in pieces. I took it to a then ninety-year-old man who made it his hobby to collect and fix clocks. He cut a new piece of wood for the missing one at the base, oiled the hands and glued the face and when I went to pick it up he asked me in person if I’d like to trade for one of his larger grandfather’s. But being he was a clock-man and I could see his desire to possess mine, I said, “No, thank you.”

9:11 and those moments in time when we all remember exactly what it was we were doing when time went away, melted into the ethereal and all stands still while bodies jump into, and run under, the ash. And TV screens and radios blast bombs. I was lying on my side, nursing my baby. It was sunny outside and her name too, is Sunny. My phone rang and I hesitated in picking up, the caller ID showing it was my New Hampshire cousin who often harasses me with her advice, but I did. She knew I didn’t have TV.

“Turn on your fucking radio!” she yelled.

“We’re being bombed!”

I walked to the window, sleepy, heavy-headed baby stirred enough to fast-suck, clamp down on my breast, I ducked to look under the telephone wires, tiptoed to see above the hemlocks, trying to see something, anything happening in the steady blue sky.

The clock on the mantle had stopped.