Posted March 11, 2022 – Narrated by Carmen

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“Love is space and time measured by the heart.”
Marcel Proust

Over 2,000 days ago, we set out on an adventure to experience beauty, to capture the breaths of the journey, the whispered moments, the tingling feeling you get in that instant when the sun rises and the mountains cast long shadows reaching for miles.

Other than Beauty and The Beast, this blog is our only real estate, the “X” in The Cloud where we hoard our long-winded treasure.

Whenever the cellular gods provide even a sliver of a signal, we reach into cyberspace to gather our memories and assemble them into a portrait of our experience. Problem is, in the most beautiful places, the cell signals mostly suck.

The Living In Beauty blog is almost five months behind and we are currently heading north into cellular deserts. At this rate, a year from now we’ll be a year behind.

We need a montage to put the squeeze on Old Man Time.

I don’t like to rush, never have. The friction of time management burns through moments my heart wants to hold for hours.

I’m a southerner so I’m tuned to the Mississippi calendar. It’s based on the sun’s arc over a bloodhound napping on a porch. The Droolian Calendar actually adds eleven days each to June, July and August.

Before my mid-thirties, it seemed like I had all the time in the world. The tedium of adulting – juggling school and work, securing loans, repairing old houses – made life seem long, like those films you watched in school.

We became parents and everything changed. Life accelerated too quickly to absorb. Looking back, raising a child seems like a sixty-second montage of stops: Diapers, babysitters, graduation day; and starts: first day of kindergarten, choir recital, military enrollment. Parenting moved along like (yikes) that hoaky Days of Our Lives hourglass.

If we could cheat time we’d have fast-forwarded through the 80’s and 90’s and raised our son in slow-motion so we could document every moment. But real life is the other way around, and the homestretch feels like a runaway train.

Last Christmas Eve, our smart young friend Liam walked us through the numbers like a sage. “Do you realize,” he said, while addressing a roomful of champagne-buzzed sixty-somethings marveling over the deprivations of our depression-era parents, “that 1980 is as far from 1939 as 1980 is from today?”

The room went still as we all considered our so-called vintage goods from the 70’s and 80’s. Liam’s calculations also covered our parents generation and our grandparents who kept a solid grip on their cisterns, chamber pots, sink pumps, butter churns and clothes lines because even under the pressure of accelerating progress their essentials had integrity.

Real life is a montage.

If time cannot be measured true, and progress is determined by the test of time, then the heart is the best device to measure endurance.

The Bulova watch Jim gave me for my sixteenth birthday will outlive me, but the “Love Always” inscription will outlive the watch. Therefore, my heart informs me that the future is bright.