Ammi Midstokke: A house of clocks
My grandmother liked clocks. In fact, I’d say she had a sort of fascination with timekeeping, as if it was responsible for her productivity or a marker of her success.
In every room of the house, clocks whirred and chimed, ticked and tocked, and invariably announced the passing of time in quarter-hour increments so the whole house would come to a bell-resonating crescendo at the top of the hour.
As a child, I remember waking to count the chimes. If there were nine, it was only a matter of minutes before Granny would open the door and rouse our lazy bones, noting that the day waits for no one. She never said as much, but she came from an era when sleep was apparently a frivolous luxury. Or perhaps it was that she raised five children alone, two of them not long for this world. She knew most acutely what it meant to have a limited number of hours in a life.
I wonder if our teen years were an affront to her losses, how we squandered hours by sleeping in. Now in her echoing house, I rise with the sun and look out the balcony windows at the rushing river, the pines, the way the years have worked the land and grown the trees. When I patter down the stairs, the house is silent but for soft hum of an oxygen machine and the march of the clocks.
The ceaseless tick-tock in the house is the metronome to our lives. Once ignored, now undeniable.
Some of the clocks have gone away. Some are run on batteries. Others have just stopped and not been started again. The Swiss clock with the milk maid that chased a dog every hour, a vague memory in my catalogue of clocks that were. I remember when she purchased it on a trip to visit me in Europe, how childlike with wonder and playfulness she was showing me its brightly painted characters. As if the relentless rhythm of time might have a sense of humor.
It is decidedly neutral, I am sure.
One clock was given to my parents, perhaps as a housewarming gift, lost in the dissemination of assets decades later. I cannot hear it anymore, only see the numbers on it clearly, the manager of our morning routines and the mad rush to get out the door. That clock hung on our wall like a sentinel of my grandmother’s unspoken expectations, a symbol of my parents’ midlife years of ambition, striving, and most of all, pressure.
In my grandmother’s room, which is where I sleep when I visit, all the clocks have stopped. The one with the numbers that flip like old airport departure signs is forever stuck in late morning. A wind-up alarm clock is propped open, its radioactive glow-in-the-dark numbers now as defunct and antiquated as the jarring sound of its ring.
They say time heals all wounds, but what if time stops?
My grandmother hasn’t been in this room for more than a decade, her ashes long distributed to final adventures, save for a small container of bone dust I occasionally rattle for her advice. I suspect time goes on with grief until the bereaved have joined the lost and the baton is merely passed on. She mourned, stoic and uncomplaining, until it was our turn to mourn her.
And I still do.
Even as we prepare, with utmost delicacy and a strange sort of pragmatism, for the inevitable outcome of time on the other significant life in this house: my grandmother’s partner, Marge. Every visit is now peppered with a macabre kind of free garage sale, a Swedish death cleaning, in which one is asked if they want this or that piece of furniture.
But all I want is a clock. Preferably one that stopped on a morning during which the house smelled of overcooked bacon and cholesterol-free bran muffins. One that paused forever as my grandmother hollered up the stairs at us to come eat, or Marge passed the butter for our fresh corn or served some horrific midwestern jello casserole with canned fruit and marshmallows in it. I want a clock that stopped when the house was vibrant and full of our child voices, a veritable army of cousins warring over which color cup they wanted, a clock that stopped before we understood how much we had to lose.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com