Old Clocks, Summer Nights and Firefly Dust

The old clock sat on a mantle in my grandfather’s house. It had been finely crafted of dark walnut in 1879, nine years before my grandfather was born, and a full 60 years before this treasured timepiece became his. The clock had been given to his mother on her wedding day; and now that it was his, he loved this old clock like he loved life itself — cleaning, waxing, repairing and meticulously winding it every 8 days. Life in his house ebbed and flowed around the movements and chimes of this clock, just as it had done for generations.

Along the top of it’s beautiful wooden housing, there ran a gingerbread design that gave my over-imaginative 7-year-old self, fearful images of tombstones and rising vaporous spirits. Those same imaginings gave all of us, cousins and siblings alike, much license to conjure ghost stories, holding flashlights under our chins for drama in the darkness of the bedroom that was conveniently above where the clock waited, suspending time and mysteriously chiming the hour at just the right moment in our stories of death and betrayals.

This keeper of time fascinated me. I loved to peer beyond it’s glass face, beyond it’s etched leaves and herons, into it’s inner workings, keenly watching the pendulum swing back and forth until the Normandy chimes announced the new hour.

I believe my grandfather knew of this fascination and chose me, above all the cousins, to help wind the clock. No one, other than my grandfather, was ever allowed to touch the clock, much less wind it; and to be chosen to do so was such a special, anointed feeling, indeed. He taught me how to take my time and insert the brass key, just so; and then how to use the key to wind it… slowly, and never, ever to overwind the spring…

Even though this old clock sat rather majestically on the mantle in his house, it was far more “magic” than a majestic time keeper for me. It took on the persona and aura of the man who maintained the time through the years… smelling faintly of printer’s ink, old wax and pipe tobacco.

“…it twinkled with firefly dust”

It carried the sizzle of my grandmother’s fried chicken in the summer, of berry cobbler and playing hide and seek in the hydrangeas at twilight… it twinkled with firefly dust. It’s waxed wood reflected the hot, summer sheen on the faces of the adults, sitting on the porch in rockers on Sunday afternoons… heads bent, in conversations and the latest gossip, over iced tea with fresh mint from the garden. The clock’s aura was one of a time gone by.

Generations have come and gone, the mantle clock endured, and it’s brass key has been passed. This precious, antique timepiece has found it’s way home, to me, where it continues to weave it’s magic of that time gone by; of summers spent at my grandparent’s home, of pipe tobacco and of fireflies in mason jars, pitchers of Kool Aid, collecting hen’s eggs and a child’s freedom to simply… be.