Post 36/2024. Rome City, Indiana. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it untold times: time flies. I bury my nose in a book, do various projects around home, take walks, go to appointments, nap, follow the news, get groceries, visit with folks–September has already had it all as the month sails on. Here’s a word on fleeting time from Virgil (79-19 B.C.): “But meanwhile it is flying, irretrievable time is flying.”

Another translation says, “But meanwhile it is flying, flying never to return.” The sentence is from Virgil’s Georgics, a poem on farming. Time passes almost unnoticed, I know from growing up on a farm and from my remunerative employment years. I know it in retirement, too.

On the farm, we had an annual day at the beach on Lake Huron in late August, just before the start of school. On Sundays, our sabbath, the activities on the farm slowed down to the essentials of animal care, church, company for dinner, stories among those gathered in the living room–and naps. Time’s velocity could be measured in a snore or two. Looking back, I like the balance a Sunday sabbath gave to the week. Virgil could have been saying, make the most of your moments–on and off the farm.

Labor Day pause

On Labor Day Marty and I returned to the Gene Stratton-Porter Historic Site at Rome City, Indiana. A marker notes: “Best-selling author, Stratton-Porter (1863-1924) aimed to inspire appreciation of nature in readers. Lived and worked at Limberlost Cabin, Geneva, then Wildflower Woods, here. Wrote for magazines such as Outing and Ladies Home Journal. Published photographs and studies of life in nearby woods and swamps. Her novels blended fiction with vivid descriptions of nature.”

Further: “Ten million copies of her books sold by 1924, including internationally popular Freckles (1904) and Girl of the Limberlost (1909). She secured financial independence through her writing at a time before many women had professional careers. In California, 1920s, she pursued production of movies based on her novels. Organized her own movie production company in 1924.”

Happy pastimes–and rewarding labor–this week.

-John