The Calculation of Time

take the old garden road only as far as we could drive and do our prospecting from the car. Some memories we can recall clearly enough to recover the time in anguished detail. We nourish these memories because they nourish us and because we are sure they tell us important things about ourselves. So I have carefully kept the memory of that day—of my mother's happiness to be going around the garden road again, of my father's hopefulness that we would find grapes, of the great care with which I drove over the rocks, even of the red and black checked flannel shirt I was wearing. And I remember where we found the grapes. They hung in a sassafras tree on a sharp left curve at the top of the ridge. I climbed the tree and threw the grapes down to Mom. She'd spread out her apron to catch them, while Dad picked what he could reach from the ground. It was late evening when we turned the car into the red sun and came off the mountain, tired and supremely happy. Of course, the real work was still ahead, the stemming, the steaming, the squeezing , the cooking, the sealing. And always the washing up, in a kitchen where water had to be carried in with a bucket and heated on the stove. But it is the gathering I remember most, and the great satisfaction of my mother in doing what she was very sure she had been put on earth to do—providing for the family she had borne and brought up with such love and labor. The work and the places and the times had had their way with her. In that grim trade-off medicine so often gives, the drugs that had eased her arthritis had weakened her body. The following May she herself was gathered home and folded into the hills that had already received several of her brothers and sisters . Near the place where she was laid, her father slept, and not far away my father's father. Six years later Dad joined her there, after a long and bitter grieving. From the burying, Jim and I drove with friends and family to see the old homeplace, long since abandoned and slowly being taken over by the honeysuckle and kudzu. Not far from the front yard, closer than we had ever found them before, young grapes hung in clusters, the vines having crept down the hillside to the chestnut trees my father had planted there. I hope someone gathers them this October. Mom and Dad would like that. The Calculation of Time The systematic linearity of time is measured with quartz accuracy, is caught in days, in hours, in quantum bits with digital precision. Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick. But linear time will not behave: ten thousand buffaloes come charging past, succeeded by the saunter of a snail; wool thread spins up slubbed, bunched up, stretched out thin; tight-held pulsing snake muscles out of grasp; rain drizzles, trickles down a branch and hangs, suspending me in one cathedral drop. -Alice Ervine 27 ...