Like most people, I have several clocks in my house. One may tell me it’s 11:30 a.m., another may say 11:35. This drives my husband crazy. I kind of like it, the notion that the measurement of time is only as accurate as the device. Some clocks like to run fast, others slow. Just read Alan Lightman’s exquisite Einstein’s Dreams, with its rich imagining of different theories of time via a brilliant patent clerk’s dreams before his awakening to the one that would forever change our perception of the time-space continuum.  In one world, there are no houses in the valleys or plains, everyone having moved to the mountains once it was discovered that “time flows more slowly the farther from the center of the earth.” In another place, time stands still. Everything is relative, isn’t it?

I went out for a walk a little earlier than usual this morning, to beat the inclement weather that www.weather.com tells me is on the way.  Rain is coming  at 11:00 a.m., snow a little later.  I can monitor its progress in fifteen-minute increments. Know before you go.

I’ve long had  a certain fascination with the notion of a Leap Year. In some traditions it’s considered an unlucky day to be born. In astrological circles, ‘Leapers’ (or ‘Leaplings’)  have “a general magical and  reputation as being lucky.” To my own thinking, how could it be anything but special (even if confusing) to (technically) celebrate a birthday once every four years?

I have nothing but great admiration for those who spend their lives in search of precision and what their own curiosity about the inner workings of all things, both in the natural and man-made worlds, makes available to me. At the same time, we’re all only human and I do smile at the suggestion of vanity that left February short a few days. Here’s what David Ewing Duncan writes in his well-researched and delightfully written Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year:  It was under the reign of Julius Caesar that January  came to mark the beginning of the year (formerly it was March). Accurate as the new calendar was, it was not free from errors, and, centuries later, another emperor (Augustus) came up with some reforms.

“But either out of vanity or because his supporters demanded it, the Senate decided that Augustus’s new month, with only 30 days, should not have fewer days than the month honoring Julius Caesar, with 31 days. So a day was snatched from February, leaving it with only 28 days — 29 in  leap year.”

The Jewish calendar, a lunar one, has a leap month. For Native Americans, the concept of time encompasses much more than its linear component.  And who knows what the Mayan calendar has in store for us this year?

All of which is to say: Time is nothing short of what you make of it.