Time Will Tell

One of my strongest memories of my maternal grandmother involves a clock ... yes, a clock. Granny had a clock that hung on the wall above her fireplace, a large box-style clock that chimed every hour, the number of chimes corresponding to the time of day it was. I've spoken before about Granny being a short, stout woman with thick, snow-white hair crowning her head, and it still causes me to smile that her last name was Waddle. She did indeed waddle when she walked. Each night, my short little granny would push her old green ottoman to the front of the fireplace and climb up on it to wind the clock. There was a little wand that she used to wind the gears on one side that made the clock tick and the gears on the other side that made the clock chime. And each time she went through her clock-winding routine, I would ask her if the clock would tick and chime forever. Her reply was always the same, "Time will tell, won't it now, child? Time will tell."

I've been thinking about time a lot lately ... how slowly or quickly it passes, how much time is involved in accomplishing certain tasks, how the way I spend my time is sometimes my choice while at other times it's not, and how when it is within my power to choose how to divide my time why I make the choices that I do. Lots of people complain about not having enough time to do all they need to do, and yet, they manage to find time for things they want to do. I'm guilty of that myself ... telling someone I can't help out with a project or I don't have time to meet them for lunch or I'm too busy to serve at church. And even as the words come out of my mouth, I'm mentally planning time to accomplish a task that's important to me or meet someone else for dinner or go shopping on a Sunday morning.

How I spend my time really does tell a lot about who and what are important to me, and I hope that if I haven't learned anything else in my 51 plus years of life I've learned to make time for the people I love. I hope I've come to understand that none of us have the guarantee of our next breath or another moment of life and that it is only by God's grace that I wake each morning and greet another day.

I can't help but think of the last six weeks of my mom's life when she moved here to Kansas City. It was a challenge to keep up with everything in my life ... working full-time, being a single mom to two teenagers still at home and my oldest in college, and doing everything I needed to do to take care of Mom, including seeing her every day, taking her to doctor's appointments, doing her laundry, and cooking all of her meals. Had Mom lived for many more years, I would have gladly accepted the responsibility of caring for her even though it would have taken up a great deal of my time. I would not take back one second of the time I spent with her, not one second ... not one second. In fact, I'd give everything I own to have one more hour just to sit and talk to her, to listen to her stories, to see her little eyes squeeze shut when she laughed, to wrap my arms around her and tell her one more time how very much I loved her. I never fully understood the importance of those moments until she was gone, and her unexpected death forever changed the way I view spending time with the people I love.

Granny's clock hangs in my small family room now, and each time I look at it on the wall, I think about Granny standing on her green ottoman going through her nightly winding routine. It hasn't ticked or chimed in many years, and to have it repaired is quite expensive. But it doesn't matter to me that it doesn't work anymore ... it doesn't matter at all. What matters is that it's a reminder to me ... a reminder of the legacy of my family, a reminder of how fleeting time can be, a reminder to make time to listen and laugh and love. Granny was right all those years ago ... time really will tell.