I want to talk about time.

I’m not quite sure what I mean to say, except that time seems to be important lately, in this time. Genealogy charts, birth dates, death dates, counting down days to book releases, the end of internships and road trips and school and loans and graduation and decisions. I look at old pictures of the landscape and I see nature has been razed to the ground, the earth brown and nearly bare, and now in these exact places, there are trees and wildflowers and white butterflies and herons fishing in ponds and dragonflies chasing ripples from the heron’s long legs on the water’s surface. It is the opposite of what we expect.

The groundhogs who burrow under the historic buildings and ruin their wood are growing fat on summer greenery, storing food for their long hibernation and fledgling robins are so desperate to leave the nest and grow up that they fly-hop into traffic, and cars have to be stopped to shoo them away from the road (time).

An old friend visited and I realize that it has been two years since I left my old home (time). What I want to say is I became a new person then, but I am not new (I am very much the same teacup soul fabric, with hairline fractures that spider web outwards, melded together with bone paste and floral patterns some days in china blue and others in deep greens and reds), and I think a better way to measure the people I’ve been is through elements: first earth and air, then air, earth, fire, earth, air, water. I am water now, always waiting (time) to feel the cool waves on naked skin at dawn. I am seven elements old (thank you, old friends, for new ways of counting (time). Or by counting books. I am this many classics read, this many trash-candy books memorized.

I think the white butterflies are the key to what I think I am thinking. They are souls of the dead, eternal, but live as long as candle flames, and they are everywhere this week or month, circling around the heron and up my back, eluding sparrows who fly sideways in the air to catch them, smelling pebbles and mingling with blue wildflowers. They are air and earth and the flash of white sunlight on the water, and as they pass the leaves around them are taken by gold and red fire that smells of autumn and soft evening breezes that are the end of an old time and the start of a new year.

In this new time, I will mark the sight of the white butterflies swirling in groups at the end of every summer as my new year (time).