Where has the time gone?

An email came into my inbox this morning with the subject line, “Where has the time gone?” I started writing in response to seeing it, and this is what poured out. It’s about my Grandmother. Her name was Vivian Rieck, and she showed me the importance of wanting nothing more than what’s in front of you.

Where has the time gone?

A question we fail to answer with such cluelessness, even though, of course, we know where the time has gone.

It’s a scary question to answer if we don’t want to recognize that the adventure is behind us, or we have new wrinkles forming on the side of our eyes, or we failed to take the walk we said we were going to take every day.

Who wants to recall where the time has gone if regret exists in having to face the fact that the hours of the day have gone to working in a cubicle, only to emerge and live in another type of box in the shape of a house that feels nothing like the home we thought we were building?

Looking back on where the time has gone is less about what we haven’t done and more about what’s left to do — and worrying about whether we have the time to spare.

Time moves slowly when we see it ticking, and quickens when we meet the eyes of that person you can’t get enough of. The one you leave distractions tucked in the zipper pocket of your purse for. The friend you can’t imagine living without, even though you only have dinner once every two years.

Time moves slowly when you are arranging flowers in your favorite vase and speeds up the moment you turn away from it.

That vase is the one that reminds you that Grandma put yellow roses it when she was here — and now she’s not — but you can still smell the scent of her skin when you think of her. Or the tart apple pies baking in her oven. Or the sour taste of the rhubarb picked from her garden that you ate before it was baked because you wondered what it tasted like before she added all that sugar.

The hours you spent with someone who cared for you like that haven’t gone anywhere because you can paint the picture in your mind of her standing beside you, while you were all resting in your chairs. Her palms were together and fingers woven tight. Her hands were holding on to something that no one else could see.

A belief tucked in the caverns of her heart that someone up there was listening.

She invited us all to pray a Lutheran devotion when the table was all Catholic. No one protested because they saw her homemade fried chicken on a big, white platter in front of them.

Everyone seated considered that conflicts in religion don’t matter when someone has stood over the stove for hours before they serve you something that tastes like the delicate hand that was placed on your head when you were five. You had a fever.

When you were thirty and needed to be coddled like a kid in a moment when you had fallen and skinned your life, that hand was there.

It was always there when you decided to try something without training wheels and fell.

The warmth you sensed when you bit into the feast in front of you was nourishing — a hug so delicious that there’s no way it could be ready-made, packaged, or perfect.

It’s rustic and real — that meal tossed in flour by the cushions of her fingers.

So good that when you were finished with it, all that was left were little greasy crumbs you all loved to pick off the plate after the last piece was eaten.

When the time moves, her hand vanishes in what seems to be thin air after she takes her last breath.

You can still feel her touch, blessing your body when you need it most, because now that she’s gone, she gets a glimpse at what’s really happening and can come to you without you needing to travel or ask to be consoled.

Time has moved your relationship beyond being cradled in the nook of her arm.

She used to send you handwritten letters in cursive that you could hardly read. She told you about the tiniest things that pleased her — the red geraniums in her planters and the cardinals appearing in the skinny, half-naked tree out of the picture window in the Spring.

Her messages find you in new ways, now.

When you buy a pot and some soil and decide that red is not your color but bright pink is, and you choose a different pigment but the same flower, because all geraniums smell the same, and the memory you have of her always seems to respond to your nose.

When you wrote her back, you licked the envelope and put a stamp on the stories you would tell her. Like the one about the first time you took a seat on an airplane wearing white tights and saddle shoes and a red dress with blue and pink and yellow little flowers on it.

The pilot gave you wings, and you wanted her to know that you could fly because the simple things weren’t quite enough for you.

Even though you admire a rich, red tomato and eat it like an apple, just like she taught you, there’s something stunning about seeing it lacing a thin, white plate in a place where someone else fills your glass before it's ever empty.

It’s her fault, you laugh — she showed you the raw material, and when she picked it off the vine, you couldn’t help but see all of its potential.

Where has the time gone?

It’s not gone at all.

It’s alive and it’s with you and it doesn’t need to go anywhere or be anything that you wear on your wrist or hang on your wall or look for when you wonder how much time you have before it’s all over.

It lives in libraries and statues and relics and old clothes she left behind in the closet that are now in yours — and that means that you can wear it at any time or store it or simply admire it even if it isn’t your taste, because it says something and it makes something — and that’s called a life.

And for what it’s worth, when your time is gone, it really isn’t.

And neither are you.