The Beautiful Passage of Time

by Jill Gray Savarese

There is a place, an event where I have returned to every Spring for eighteen years in a row. For a few hours, once a year I have found myself looking at the same window, high up in a vaulted ceiling. It is always opened inward, like a door. But what strikes my imagination the most about this, is its silver curtain, billowing wildly in the breeze beneath a gilded ceiling high enough to imagine vertigo, to inspire awe and wonder about how it gets maintained.

It is a solemn event but without a hint of heaviness. It has a reverence, a hope, full of pageantry, tradition and pomp and circumstance. This place has become an unlikely pilgrimage for me. An anchor to the years of my life.

While I sit, listening to the alleluias of the chorus, watching my curtain dance in the wind, I notice the tradition. How everything has a predictability that is comforting while the rows of occupants have changed. Their faces seem younger each time and though their excitement is worn fresh in their faces, to me I see it all coming like a script. I know there will be smiles and nervous glances. I know some of them must visibly will themselves not to be moved, to force the shine in their eyes to recede.

And I remember. I feel the music so still it vibrates and I see the flapping of the curtain in steady chaos while I remember the years before this one. I remember being young enough to be proud to be a part of this, less sure of myself, adrenaline going through me to manage what I couldn't expect. I remember being pregnant and marveling at what a difference a year makes. Then the year of pressured breasts, my baby at home waiting to be fed. The time my clothes fit happily loose and the time I wondered how I could come to own the same pants for 7 years.

I remember heartbreak befalling minutes before I arrived one year and the energy it took to appear as if it hadn't. The time I had a life event without compare, something I never thought would happen in my lifetime, yet realized. Happiness.

And in the end there really is no message. Except that despite the return, nothing changes, yet paradoxically everything changes and I can count on that too.

That there is beauty and ritual in the passage of time, of living all the parts of my life in all of its surprise. How time appears to speed up and how imperfect some of my choices have been and how perfect others are.

But most of all, how there is no guarantee that I will do year 19 here, but I hope I do. I hope that next year brings something joyful and unexpected. That something light and breezy flows in through that window and makes me feel like that first breeze of summer when the windows are finally opened and the air is clean, caressing my face. And the skies beyond are clear blue.

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I didn't do year 19, as fate would have it, because of Covid-19. It's now 2022, three years later, and I finally did get my year 19. It was moved outside so I didn't get to see my window and curtain but the breeze was still there and stronger than ever.