Kirsten's Mother

 The shriek of the table saw filled the room as it came up to speed, and no doubt filled the house as well and perhaps the nearby neighborhood. She pushed the block of wood into the blade.

Usually, she would have used a stick to push it, but it was only this once… Something caught, and for a moment she didn’t even feel it. But the blood from her finger sprayed her face, and she couldn’t see through one lens of her glasses.

Instantly, she knew what she had done—ignored the universal safety precaution: ALWAYS use a pusher with a power saw. She half heard something hit the floor, and bent over to see the block of wood lying next to one of her fingers.

Rita was a retired nurse. She knew immediately what had to be done. Grabbing a handkerchief from her pocket, she wound it tightly around the stump of her finger, then switched off the saw, picked up the severed finger and went into the kitchen. Taking a tray of ice cubes from the freezer, she filled a small bowl with ice and laid the finger in among the ice.

Then she sat down, suddenly feeling faint. “Oh, damn!” she said aloud.

As soon as the lightheadedness eased, she went quickly into the front hall, put on a jacket and grabbed her keys from the stand by the door. The cold air felt good on her face as she ran to her car, spilling a few ice cubes but not the finger from the bowl.

The hospital was only a few blocks away. She managed to drive with one hand, keeping the injured one held close to her breast. At the emergency entrance, she picked up the bowl of ice, left the car where she had stopped, and staggered through the doors, feeling faint again. A nurse saw her and the bandaged hand, and quickly came to her. Rita handed her the bowl. “My finger is in there,” she said.

Somebody pushed a wheelchair against the back of her legs. She sat down heavily. As she was wheeled through the doors into the emergency room proper, blackness carried her away.

Sometime later, Rita woke to find herself lying on a gurney, surrounded by curtains. Her hand was heavily bandaged and supported by a small pillow next to her.

A doctor came through the curtain. “Ah,” he said, “you’re awake.”

Her bandaged hand ached. “Pretty dumb, huh?” she said, attempting a grin.

“You were smart to keep it on ice and get here so quickly. We got it sown back on, and if we’re lucky it will survive. You came in by yourself?”

She sighed. “I live alone. I knew I had to get here right away.”

“They tell me you didn’t pass out until they had you in the wheelchair. Not many people could have done that.” He grinned. “What did you cut it off with?”

“Table saw. I should have known better. I DID know better.”

“You were cutting something and the finger got in the way?”

“Dumb.”

“Well, I guess you did all the right things afterward. A lot of fingers end up getting tossed in the garbage.”

He promised to return, and swept out through the curtain.

Rita sighed. She had been using that saw for years, building things like birdhouses and shelving for her house. She loved working with wood, loved the smell and the feeling of accomplishment. Her husband had died a number of years before, and all of her children had moved away. Working in her shop in the garage, and listening to music in the evenings kept her occupied. When the weather let her, she dug in her garden and watched the birds flying over the lake.

Life was okay. Rita wasn’t sentimental. She hated the feeling that her life wouldn’t last a lot longer, but she didn’t dwell on it. Kirsten, her eldest, lived somewhere Back East with a man. The boys—hard to realize they were all men—lived somewhere in the vicinity, all still single and getting in trouble with the law now and then. She was content to live alone. Her hearing was getting bad, though, probably from the noise of the table saw. She knew that she should be using protectors, but she kept forgetting to buy them. She found that she could hear her music better through headphones.

Later that day they let her go home. She had called her middle son to come and get her, since she couldn’t drive with the sedative the hospital had given her. “Mom, what were you thinking?” he asked, glancing at her in the car.

“Wasn’t thinking,” she muttered. “And get that grin off your face!”

Instantly sober, he said, “You’re going to need help until that heals. Let’s see if Tom can come over and stay with you. He owes you.”

“Talk about it later. I can manage.”

Her hand was beginning to throb.

"Here Comes the Sun"

This essay was published in a small community newsletter about February 1.

The sun is, indeed, coming back, and the days are getting longer. Remember that song by George Harrison?

“Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter,
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here,
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
And I say it's all right…”

After a long and lonely covid year, winter just seemed to clinch the mood. (Some of us, of course, managed to go south and escape at least the worst of the cold and darkness, even if not the horror of covid.)

But spring is coming. And the light. And the vaccine.

A little detail: It was darkest back in December, when the sun rose at about 8:00 AM and set at about 5:00 PM. The difference between sunrise and sunset was only 9 hours. Now, in February, we’re getting almost an hour more daylight, most of it in the afternoon. The sun rises ten minutes earlier and sets forty minutes later.

And that rate of change is getting faster. Around March 20 near the spring equinox, the sun will rise at 7:35 AM and set at 7:48 PM; the difference between them is 12 hours and 13 minutes. Every week, we are getting almost 20 more minutes of daylight. In June when the summer solstice occurs, the difference between sunrise and sunset will give us 15 hours and 18 minutes of sunlight, plus the daylight before sunrise and after sunset.

Notice that I say “about” a lot here. That’s because the times I got from timeanddate.com may differ a little from what we actually observe here in Centennial Farm. That’s also because we can’t see the actual horizon at either sunrise or sunset; they take place behind hills and trees and other obstructions. Because we are about 42 degrees north of the equator, we get our sunrise and sunset on a path that changes IN ANGLE from season to season. (If you’re keen on geometry, you can figure that out for yourself.)

It took me several years to get my head around the idea that sunrise and sunset don’t follow the same paths from season to season. And at the summer solstice, the earliest sunrise doesn’t occur on the same date as the latest sunset. Similarly, at winter solstice the latest sunrise doesn’t occur on the same date as the earliest sunset. The solstices are based on the average length of days. You’ve probably noticed that the solstices don’t even fall on the same calendar days every year. The earth wobbles a bit on its axis.

We think of the rotation of the earth and its revolution around the sun as fixed and as certain as anything in life. Well, it seems, not quite.

If we can adjust to these variations, we ought to be able to adjust to the vagaries of whether a vaccine will definitely prevent us from getting the virus, just as we accept that on next Thursday the sky MIGHT be sunny or cloudy, or that rain is MERELY FORECAST to begin tomorrow at 5:00 PM. When we will be able to safely gather with other people without masks or social distancing is only LIKELY at some particular date in the future.  We have to live with those uncertainties.

“Here comes the sun,” may involve some of that same uncertainty about when, even as we can be sure IT WILL COME. I still remember that old song from World War II, “When the lights come on again, all over the world,” and how I yearned for someone to assure me, “when.” Whether the outlook at any moment was good or not so good, I learned that I could not predict the date that peace would arrive. But I had faith that it would, indeed, come.

George Harrison first recorded “Here Comes the Sun” in the summer of 1969—another time when most of us were wishing for the end of a war. “Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter,” was as much about hope for all of us as it was about the seasons.

We might dig out that old recording and listen to it one more time.