The Button Jar

I’ve thought a lot recently about time, and how fleeting life is. My mother’s been dead for seven years now, all my grandparents are gone, receding quickly into a few words and memories, and my oldest son, who just turned twelve, is nearly as tall as his mother. Of course, I remember him well as a little pink baby with a wrinkly face and bright eyes, wrapped in a hospital blanket and tucked into a warming bin that, today, would barely hold his sneakers.

Days blur into weeks that blur into years and, suddenly, I’m 37 and approaching my 20year high school reunion. I’m not “newly married” or “newly graduated,” I’m new nuthin.’

That’s not to say I’m depressed about it; to the contrary, life’s been good to me—a constant adventure, a series of blessings—and I enjoy where I am and the perspective that comes with a little more age and experience.

But that feeling of perpetual motion—the inexorable grinding of the gears--is bittersweet, as reflected beautifully in this poem by Carolyn Hall, one of my favorite haiku poets:

so suddenly winter
baby teeth at the bottom
of the button jar

If, as observed in an earlier post, children stand as proof that the most difficult things in life are the most worthwhile, they offer a similarly potent reminder that life is brief, and “time’s fatal wings do ever forward fly.”

(Photograph courtesy of tenthousandstars on Flickr; available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gladyoung/2840491749/; quotation from English composer and poet Thomas Campion (1567-1620).)