Roads to Joy

One doesn’t usually associate clock maintenance with large rubber mallets, a stiff piece of hardwood, and assorted mole grips, nor does one expect to see a small tortoiseshell butterfly fluttering by at the beginning of February. So today I’m musing about the unexpected, as remarkable experiences in an observed life.

I’m getting more efficient on my clock re-setting exercise (after running through two power outages over the past month, the clock in the New Galloway Town Hall tower was nearly a minute slow), and I whacked the wingnut loose, dropped the switch off the snail cam at about 15 seconds before 10:00, hoping the whir of the motor would elicit the first bong on the hour. It seemed a few seconds early, but assuming the clock may drift backwards over the coming month(s), I tightened the nut back up and left it alone.

As I left the hall from the little foyer, I nearly stepped on a butterfly perched in a dazed sort of way on the threshold. I scooped it up, but recognising that it would not be able to withstand the temperature outside, I let it fly into another room, reasonably safe from inquisitive eyes, I hoped. On my way back home, a short amble of only a few minutes, I wondered about the juxtaposition of a butterfly out of time and a clock that’s now ahead of itself.

Goodness knows, I’ve used both butterfly and clock as metaphors for numerous joyful entries, poems, memoirs and stories. But not, until now, as conjoined symbols.

Apparently, small tortoiseshell butterflies flock together to make a huge migration south for the winter months. Isolated individuals are renowned for missing the flight. I wonder how they manage to miss their peers massing into their enormous flock? Left alone, they seem to find the warmest, most sheltered place they can, where they go into a state of suspended animation, emerging only when the shelter’s temperature brings them back to insect consciousness. 

Large tower clocks, on the other hand, inanimate objects that they are, are nevertheless capable of eliciting a certain degree of empathy too. I’ve made some delightful acquaintances with local folk who now know that I’m the person who re-connected the striking mechanism, and who’s becoming a bit obsessive with ensuring that the clock tells something close to the right time. But I’m only a recent incomer to these parts, a kind of emigré from my flock, as it were. 

Without delving into chaos theory and the role of one butterfly’s wing fluttering in the grand scheme of things, we can still enjoy symbols and metaphors of time, suspended animation, and re-awakening. And I’ve been enjoying quite the most creative times over the past fortnight, stimulated by stories from my childhood, that do feel like something has been brought out of a prolonged quiescence. 

Better late than never.