On Time Travel

Time. We cannot control it or take it apart. Nor can we start it up, stop it, harness it, see it or get around it. We are stuck, riding on it or in it as it takes us where it will in its quiet, devastating way, toward the circle of our years.

I am intrigued with the sciences which attempt to simulate time, especially the going-backward people whose experiments focus on the first instant that time poked its way into this place, loaded with pure, prodigious energies which have brought us all, inexorably, through the long, unfolding eons, to this moment.

Scientific reports about such things are soft, rapturous in places; I like what this implies.

The present is sufficient for me. My own wakings, the little Epiphanies of my small world with its mutable, yielding edges. With all else that we are, we are mirrors to one another and this I can grasp and probe on my own.

As a child, I was good at managing time. It was not, then, a continuum with a relentless, number-faced steward commanding my attention.

Then I could sit underneath the spreading hydrangea bushes in the enclosing corner of our pink house and watch, with rapt attention, as the sun moved across a milky grey white cocoon delicately webbed to the basement window casing.

Whispering to it, coaxing it, hoping to see it bring forth a stately Monarch, a Mourning Cloak, a subtle flickering moth -- something lovely with dewy wings, something promised and given, that would peek out into my warm dappled light and want to stretch into it.

I was its intense companion in this secret place, breathless, endlessly patient, silent, motionless, both of us waiting in the fragrant shade for it to take its first uneven flight up into the deep bouquets of blue and purple flowers.

Days went by, weeks, years. I was orphaned, lost, found, I had many children, rescued forests full of small animals from unnamed perils; cloaked in white I took balloon rides, fought bullies, and travelled many times to the Mediterranean Sea.

All of this and I would still be waiting for my friend because I knew, then, how to float in time. Eventually big feet would appear outside my sanctuary, scratching soles in the gravel path, my name would ring off the walls and leaves and I would be summoned, with a slow crashing sensation, back to the noisy common world.

It was advisable, I recall, to pause until the coast was clear before I would, in my ordinary clothes and wisdom, advance toward the screen door and other solids.

Now I am the mother. The one who must, occasionally reel in my own dream child from similar dalliances in that watery kind of time.

My out-of-time clock still runs, but mostly I am engaged to the season and hour with the landscape presently greening with early bulbs and watercress and grasses. I know that, along with these, down in the sod and weeds at the base of the lilacs now in fat bud, I will find the spunky tender spikes of my chive plants.

Attuned, aproned, armed with my kitchen scissors, I have been trimming away at them for potatoes, salads, sandwiches. But not to diminish the pleasure I take in these minor gatherings, I am waiting, waiting, waiting for the blooms and a Sister Abagail's Chive Blossom Omelet.

For this otherwise ordinary, simple omelet, with its hidden cache of lavender onion spice, one must be willing to be alert and forbearing in order to capture the flowers at their peak -- not too young, still in their sheath, not old and dry, but just fully opened, slightly moist from the evening air, preferably. So. When the chives give the signal, trot to the garden for:

3 blossoms per person, separated

Have ready for each person, lined up for assembly line construction, butter for skillet, a wire whip, warm plates, good coffee, fruit, etc. and:

2 eggs

fresh parsley, finely chopped

salt, pepper

1/3 C. grated cheese of choice

Preheat a good 8" skillet; crack into a small bowl and whip 2 eggs with just a drop or two of water and a tablespoon of parsley.

Add a pat of butter to the pan Swish the butter around over every surface of the skillet, which should be just hot enough that it will sizzle gently. Pull the little blossoms from the cluster.

Pour the eggs in and let them sit for a bit so that the bottom skin of the omelet has a chance to form; then, as you see the egg looking cooked around the edges, lift the outer contour up, allowing the liquid egg to replace it on the bottom. It will wrinkle on in to the center.

Add salt and pepper to taste and keep lifting the edges until the egg is mostly jelled. Resist scrambling.

Now you can add the cheese and the blossoms and take the plunge with a spatula in one hand, and fold the omelet in half, deftly, along the line of the handle. Count to 20.

Fold it over again onto the plate of the first person in line.

Carry on until everyone is fed and is full of eggs and flowers. Now talk philosophy. Lots of good questions should arise.