Speaker 1: The first time I noticed anything odd about sealine grove,
Speaker 1: I was sitting on a splintered wooden bench at the
Speaker 1: railway station, waiting for the morning train to Downbridge. The
Speaker 1: air was the kind you get only a few miles
Speaker 1: from flat shimmering salt fields, sharp and dry, smelling like
Speaker 1: distant rain and the remains of last season's brine. I
Speaker 1: was early, by preference and by the habits of a
Speaker 1: career spent among timetables, signal levers, and station master's keys.
Speaker 1: My daughter insisted on coming to meet me in Downbridge,
Speaker 1: and I didn't want to be late for her, Still
Speaker 1: finding my footing as a grandfather, still missing my wife,
Speaker 1: no matter how many days I built around routine or
Speaker 1: helpful projects. The station clock, a mossy faced one in
Speaker 1: a copper housing so old I doubted anyone remembered its
Speaker 1: original polish, said seven forty three. I recall that because
Speaker 1: I looked at my phone and my inherited pocket watch
Speaker 1: almost simultaneously. Both said seven forty two. Sufficiently close, I thought,
Speaker 1: although my mind registered the difference. Across the square, the
Speaker 1: bakery's clock, an ornate staring our contraption over the blue door,
Speaker 1: told me it was already seven forty nine, bold and insistent.
Speaker 1: The post office clock, just visible past the trees lining
Speaker 1: main Street, lagged at seven forty one. It's minute hand
Speaker 1: stubbornly slow. I should have found it amusing a small
Speaker 1: town quirk, the sort of thing a traveler from the
Speaker 1: city might jot in a letter home, underlining the country's
Speaker 1: disregard for precision. Yet what struck me wasn't confusion, but
Speaker 1: perfect easy order. A cluster of children, school bags swinging,
Speaker 1: straggling in ones and twos, waited near the curb. The
Speaker 1: bus trundling up Maine halted as the Bakeri's clock hit
Speaker 1: seven fifty, and the driver beckoned with a horn blast.
Speaker 1: Not a flicker of worry from the parents, hugging short
Speaker 1: good byes. The bakery's doors swung open, and the day's smells,
Speaker 1: yeast cinnamon, spilled into the street. Marrable herself emerged in
Speaker 1: her pale, pink apron, placing baskets in the window, as
Speaker 1: if seven forty nine was as fixed a fact as gravity.
Speaker 1: The post office clerk, chestnut hair up in a loose knot,
Speaker 1: unlocked her door right at seven forty two, then stopped
Speaker 1: on the threshold to share a private joke with the grocer,
Speaker 1: whose wristwatch she checked, then adjusted her own. Two older
Speaker 1: men on a bench beside me compared the relative merits
Speaker 1: of rye bread and local honey, then separated, one, heading
Speaker 1: toward the town hall and its own sun tarnished time piece. Throughout,
Speaker 1: no one hustled, no one checked phones with a scowl,
Speaker 1: no one called out that they were late. Schedules flowed,
Speaker 1: school children loaded and gone. The baker's regulars lined up,
Speaker 1: the station master whistling as he wiped the ticket window.
Speaker 1: The conductor, a round man with the battered dignity of
Speaker 1: some one who doubt lasted. Several uniforms, strolled past his
Speaker 1: wrist watch set by the station clock, and not once
Speaker 1: did I see the smallest sign of debate about which
Speaker 1: time was right. Over the years, I'd seen towns with
Speaker 1: clocks stopped fast or just ignored, but nothing like this,
Speaker 1: an entire place unbothered by discordant time, functioning as if
Speaker 1: none existed. I watched a farmer's truck pass through the square,
Speaker 1: engine backfiring, and every head turned at what seemed the
Speaker 1: expected moment, as if on a queue I'd missed. I
Speaker 1: felt the first tingling pressure of curiosity there, like a
Speaker 1: gentle push on the back of my mind. How could
Speaker 1: three clocks at least preside over morning routines, each keeping
Speaker 1: its own hour. Why did no one seem bothered or
Speaker 1: even notice? The conductor Geno, I would learn, caught my gaze.
Speaker 1: You'll be boarding, mister West, right on time this fine morning,
Speaker 1: he said, and the word time seemed to hang in
Speaker 1: the saltedged air a little longer than usual. I nodded,
Speaker 1: but my mind was already elsewhere, already asking right on
Speaker 1: time by whose measure? And how does a whole town
Speaker 1: agree to disagree? Not just in theory, but every minute
Speaker 1: of every day. I found myself wanting, suddenly and irrationally
Speaker 1: to understand the secret gears inside this quiet, SunShot place.
Speaker 1: I am, by habit and nature, a man who wants
Speaker 1: a clock to be right. Selin Grove is small enough
Speaker 1: that a board visitor can cross from railway to market
Speaker 1: square in three minutes. Most houses circle the compact center,
Speaker 1: their pitched roofs limmed white by generations of airborne salt.
Speaker 1: The salt flats themselves, stretching forever east and south, spill
Speaker 1: glittering mirage light over the town when the sun is high.
Speaker 1: It is a place that, to an outsider, appears coddled
Speaker 1: by its own remoteness, a stubbornly living diorama of the
Speaker 1: mid twentieth century, with only the infrequent buzz of livery
Speaker 1: drones overhead to break any illusion of the past. After
Speaker 1: forty years of railway engineering, I kept time almost as
Speaker 1: a prayer. I could tell you which lines were on
Speaker 1: which schedules, which models of guards, stopwatch, Omger or Hanhart
Speaker 1: drifted more over a ten mile local, which stations were sticklers,
Speaker 1: and which quietly amazed you by always being inexplicably prompt,
Speaker 1: despite equipment fit for the museum. All this learned the
Speaker 1: hard way, with cold fingers and note books in every pocket.
Speaker 1: There were only two kinds of time table in my world,
Speaker 1: the kind that worked by being universally adopted, and the
Speaker 1: kind that led to miss trains, angry passengers, or disaster.
Speaker 1: When Helen died eight months before my arrival in Salin,
Speaker 1: I found I could not sit still in the flat
Speaker 1: weed shared. My daughter urged me to come live near by.
Speaker 1: Help with the girls, Dad, please, or I'll lose my mind.
Speaker 1: I bought the brick cottage on the edge of the flats,
Speaker 1: learned the nurse nervous excitement of grandparenthood, and imagined that
Speaker 1: the strict comfort of schedules, school runs and recipe books
Speaker 1: would fill the slow, amorphous days of grief. Instead, I
Speaker 1: found myself haunted by clocks, not by their ticking, or
Speaker 1: even by nostalgia for the sound, by their refusal here
Speaker 1: in Celine Grove to play by the rules that had
Speaker 1: shaped my life. Within a week, I saw the patterns
Speaker 1: neither random nor lazy. If they were simply off by accident,
Speaker 1: someone would fix them, or at least grumble. Instead, the
Speaker 1: clocks had staked out territory. Marrable, whose sourdough is well
Speaker 1: known in three counties, opens the bakery at seven forty nine, sharp,
Speaker 1: snipping the closed signed down with parade Marshal's precision. No
Speaker 1: daylight savings, confusion, no glancing at her phone. Her regulars,
Speaker 1: a steady and diverse collection of early rises, seemed to
Speaker 1: multiply naturally around that number, as if their bodies responded
Speaker 1: to more than sunlight or hunger. The school principal, mister Karrrs,
Speaker 1: a towering man with the kindly patience of a heron
Speaker 1: rings the school bell at exactly seven fifty three. Bell
Speaker 1: rope yanked with theater worthy finality. The sound skips across
Speaker 1: the salt, like news spreading to children still brushing their teeth.
Speaker 1: Buses and parents move accordingly, and not one car is
Speaker 1: seen tearing up the lane in that panicked, almost universal
Speaker 1: late parent way. Gino the conductor checks his battered silver
Speaker 1: wristwatch obsessively, but always sets it by the station clock,
Speaker 1: never the bakery, never the tower at the town hall.
Speaker 1: Where you are is what time you're on? I overheard
Speaker 1: him telling a school by one morning, smiling as if
Speaker 1: it were the simplest thing in the world. A busker
Speaker 1: on the steps of the market told me the farmers
Speaker 1: stalls open when the hall clock chimes eight, not a
Speaker 1: moment sooner. Folks will cue but not complain. I tried
Speaker 1: gently at first to confirm the oddity, asked Marrable, under
Speaker 1: pretext of common implementing her Danish if her clock was stuck,
Speaker 1: and she blinked, then laughed, as if I'd cracked a joke. Stuck.
Speaker 1: Oh no, if it was stuck, I'd burn the couassas
Speaker 1: every day she tapped the glass face fondly and dangled
Speaker 1: the key. She wound it with every Friday. No one,
Speaker 1: it seemed, was anxious or even aware of discord. I,
Speaker 1: who'd spent half a life associating time with responsibility, chafed
Speaker 1: at what looked like misalignment, but played out in perfect,
Speaker 1: untroubled choreography. The harmony should not have been possible. Everything
Speaker 1: I knew screamed that. Yet life moved here, teeming punctual,
Speaker 1: but never bound to one clock, one authority. The contradiction
Speaker 1: itched more intriguing every day. My test came naturally with
Speaker 1: the next train. I lined up as one of six passengers,
Speaker 1: an older couple in hiking boots, a pair of teenagers
Speaker 1: peering into phone screens, and a deliveryman with a precarious
Speaker 1: stack of boxes. I'd checked my phone, set my pocket
Speaker 1: watch to Internet time, checked the station clock, then watched,
Speaker 1: almost nervously, as the minute hand crept to seven fifty nine.
Speaker 1: The conductor stepped out, precisely, then waving his cap as
Speaker 1: the engine throttled up all aboard eight zero zero away
Speaker 1: the train slipped forward. My phone, quietly, insistent, ticked over
Speaker 1: to seven fifty seven. My pocket watch now deliberately UNSYNCD
Speaker 1: claimed it was seven fifty six. The official timetable, posted
Speaker 1: behind smudged glass said departure at eight zero zero, Sale
Speaker 1: and time. The difference on paper trivial, irritated something fossilized
Speaker 1: in me. How could Gino declare write on time when
Speaker 1: every portable device in the carriage was off by at
Speaker 1: least two minutes. As we passed by the bakery, still
Speaker 1: catching the morning sun, I looked from its clock, now
Speaker 1: on eight zero four, to the horologists shot beside it.
Speaker 1: The watch repair man, a leathery fellow with awlly glasses,
Speaker 1: was winding four pocket watches in his window, each set differently.
Speaker 1: I realized none of the times matched, yet all seemed
Speaker 1: to tick with confidence. I stood, unable to ignore it
Speaker 1: any longer, and asked the nearest fellow passenger, missus Lyle,
Speaker 1: a retired teacher now keeping a garden big enough for
Speaker 1: a family of marmots, if they're ever interested. She smiled
Speaker 1: at my question, eyes twinkling, Oh you mean the clocks,
Speaker 1: they're all correct, depending never been a bother, not once.
Speaker 1: Don't meetings get missed? Doesn't anyone show up late? I pressed,
Speaker 1: half apologetic. She shrugged. Not really, you just look at
Speaker 1: the right clock for what you're setting out to do.
Speaker 1: She frowned, as if turning over a thought with care. Funny,
Speaker 1: though I can't say if they ever were the same,
Speaker 1: I suppose if they were, nobody mentions it now. She
Speaker 1: turned to the window. The conversation ended by her contentment.
Speaker 1: The contradiction gathered a whole town moving precisely so it seemed,
Speaker 1: yet organized, not around one time, but several, each independent
Speaker 1: and yet compatible. It clashed with every lesson of my
Speaker 1: railway past, with the very reasons standardized time existed, yet
Speaker 1: in sale and grove routines fit like the teeth of
Speaker 1: hidden gears. For the first time in years, I found
Speaker 1: my mind absently plotting the problem, like a district engineer
Speaker 1: tracing fault lines. I hardly slept that night, replaying every
Speaker 1: clock face in my memory. Convinced this was more than quirk,
Speaker 1: I resolved to document and test. The next day, I
Speaker 1: strapped on my walking shoes, note book in hand, determined
Speaker 1: to chart the town's temporal landscape in full. At six
Speaker 1: fifty according to my phone calibrated at home from a
Speaker 1: server four hundred miles away, I set off deciding that
Speaker 1: as an act of good faith, i'd set my own
Speaker 1: ancient railwayman's wrist watch, last serviced in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: to match the bakery clock as a starting point. As
Speaker 1: I left my cottage, I saw the sun bleeding pink
Speaker 1: into the salt flats, every blade of grass laced in
Speaker 1: rueful sheen. The first order of business was the bakery itself,
Speaker 1: a hive of motion. By seven forty nine bakery time,
Speaker 1: marrable hands dusted with flour, gave me a conspiratorial smile.
Speaker 1: As I waved my note book. I told her I
Speaker 1: was doing a project on local routines. Half drew, and
Speaker 1: she seemed delighted. It's easy, dear, she said, I open
Speaker 1: at seven forty nine because folks come for bread at
Speaker 1: seven fifty. That's when the bus has just passed. People
Speaker 1: don't wait, They drift past when the bread's warm, not before.
Speaker 1: I asked if deliveries were ever late or early. She
Speaker 1: shook her head, cutting dough with practiced slices. Never a fuss.
Speaker 1: The milk van comes after the school run by our clock.
Speaker 1: If I set out a minute late, some one will
Speaker 1: knock to let me know. She turned to check a tray,
Speaker 1: then added, don't ask me how it works. The clock
Speaker 1: just does. Next to the school principal Carras Pristine's shirt
Speaker 1: under the ever so slightly battered navy jacket, met me
Speaker 1: as the bell rope hung in his left hand. Want
Speaker 1: to see how the sausage is made, eh, he chuckled.
Speaker 1: We ring in at seven fifty three. Kids know it
Speaker 1: down to the second. Those who bike set out when
Speaker 1: the bakery clock hits five past. I've never had to
Speaker 1: call a parent about tardiness in all my years. He
Speaker 1: showed me a clipboard to day's schedule, each item penciled
Speaker 1: next to the time from the battered iron rimmed school
Speaker 1: clock above the entrance. If you tried running by any
Speaker 1: other clock, you'd just be off and it'd be chaos.
Speaker 1: But here it works, and when someone tries to change it, well,
Speaker 1: they end up back where they started. He put it
Speaker 1: down with finality, the bell chiming a minute later, children
Speaker 1: pouring in at the precise moment. The post office was
Speaker 1: my next stop. Its clock a model of mid seventies utilitarian.
Speaker 1: The clerk Marrier barely looked up from her counter when
Speaker 1: I asked about the time. Posts handed over by the
Speaker 1: minute hand here. If you try by the bakery s,
Speaker 1: you get calls all day about miss parcels. Town Hall
Speaker 1: runs differently. Couldn't say why. Everywhere I found the same, precise,
Speaker 1: unfussy routines mapped to individual clocks, as if each was
Speaker 1: the center of its own universe. Each public space ran
Speaker 1: according to the time most natural to its Cleontell, with
Speaker 1: not a trace of tension anywhere. The only person gidea
Speaker 1: than I about the town's oddity was Hazel Newton, the
Speaker 1: spritelike historian who ran the town's lone museum out of
Speaker 1: a repurposed pharmacy. I hoped some one would notice. She chirped.
Speaker 1: When I outlined my chart on her cluttered table, a
Speaker 1: warren of yellowing pamphlets and hand dinked maps. Hazel brought
Speaker 1: out a faded trifle marked sealine meantime. A visitor's primer
Speaker 1: came up with that in the seventies. When someone can't
Speaker 1: recall whom tried to force Greenwich time on the whole
Speaker 1: valley lasted three days. It's in the margins somewhere. She
Speaker 1: tapped one of her own clocks set to Hazel's time,
Speaker 1: which differed from every other in town by two minutes
Speaker 1: and fifteen seconds. Every clock keeps its own kind of time,
Speaker 1: she said, her voice almost conspiratorial. You can trust them
Speaker 1: or not. Most go with the floe. Only becomes confusing
Speaker 1: when you try to change the flow itself, She said
Speaker 1: it as if quoting a fable. I documented in engineer's
Speaker 1: fashion everything I could day date, location, clock time, device time, schedule,
Speaker 1: and local accounts. I map the baker's opening, the school's bell,
Speaker 1: the mare's coffee hour, even the daily passage of garbage trucks,
Speaker 1: each rooted in a different standard, none the official town time.
Speaker 1: It was during this mapping that something stranger crept in
Speaker 1: My watch. Set by the bay had kept pace comfortably
Speaker 1: for two hours as I circled that block, But after
Speaker 1: settling into a sunny chair in the post office's foye,
Speaker 1: I checked it again, now reading exactly the time on
Speaker 1: the post office clock down to the minute and a
Speaker 1: full three minutes out from the bakery. Still skeptical, I
Speaker 1: assumed I'd knocked the stem winding door while sitting. I
Speaker 1: corrected it, then walked to the town square. Every half
Speaker 1: hour as I moved closer to a given public clock.
Speaker 1: My watch, never moved by my hand, began to agree
Speaker 1: with that clock, instead, drifting so subtly I only noticed
Speaker 1: by careful attention. I borrowed a cheap digital from the
Speaker 1: watch shop, setting it to the train station's time. After
Speaker 1: an hour spent chatting at the school gates, it too
Speaker 1: agreed with the school clock off from both digital phone
Speaker 1: time and the railway. Testing further, I carried my daughter's
Speaker 1: old sports watch, never wound in four years, into the bakery,
Speaker 1: then the library, then the pub. Each time I set
Speaker 1: it to one location's clock, only for it to migrate
Speaker 1: at glacial pace toward another's. All this I plotted on
Speaker 1: a map, town's center clock time, observed drift routines aligned.
Speaker 1: The map felt less like something new deused to plan roots,
Speaker 1: and more like a mechanism diagram, a set of gears,
Speaker 1: each turning at slightly varying rates, timing life instead of
Speaker 1: metal teeth. Later that evening, hunched over my notes with
Speaker 1: a mug of tea, I found a faint but persistent pattern.
Speaker 1: At certain intervals, some clocks would drift closer together, while
Speaker 1: at others gap wider. The cycle seemed to wax and
Speaker 1: wane by day, but also loosely sympathized with the phases
Speaker 1: of the moon, which on logical grounds I dismissed, Yet
Speaker 1: the numbers obliged me to mark it, whatever its cause.
Speaker 1: This was not randomness, nor a lack of upkeep or
Speaker 1: old fashioned chaos. It was impossibly a choreographer, a living polyphany,
Speaker 1: pulsing through Celang Grove, with every inhabitant participating through unspoken,
Speaker 1: mutually agreed timing. The pieces teasingly refused to fit the
Speaker 1: old solutions. Late Friday brought the regular town Council meeting
Speaker 1: in the high ceilinged hall, a room built to hold
Speaker 1: three hundred but rarely containing more than forty. I went
Speaker 1: out of habit and growing obsession. Mare Rellie, silver haired
Speaker 1: and easy with a joke, presided from a dais beside
Speaker 1: the aged mantle clock. A gender debated complaints about the
Speaker 1: new recycling bins, a motion on bus stop shelters. At
Speaker 1: the close, the Mare paused as if listening for something outside,
Speaker 1: before glancing at the town hall's clock. That's it, folks.
Speaker 1: Nine sharp meeting adjourned cheerful bangs of gravel on the table,
Speaker 1: A half dozen check watches in reflex, some nodding, none matching,
Speaker 1: but all stand, gather up papers and depart at once.
Speaker 1: The sense of choreographed routine hung in the air. Here
Speaker 1: order came not from consensus, but from belonging. You trusted
Speaker 1: your clock because your clock was your guide for your
Speaker 1: slice of communal life. No one pressed for unification, not
Speaker 1: even among the younger crowd. With hands flicking over foam screens.
Speaker 1: I tried one more time to press the issue, this
Speaker 1: time with the cheerful, broad backed bus driver Kai as
Speaker 1: he leaned against his bus, scribbling across word. I sidled
Speaker 1: up and asked if the overlapping clocks ever caused disarray.
Speaker 1: Only if you make it, he grunted. When everybody runs
Speaker 1: on their own idea of time, that's when accidents happen. Here,
Speaker 1: you trust the clocks, and the clocks return the favor,
Speaker 1: he smiled over the top of his paper. Where else
Speaker 1: could you be late and early at the same time?
Speaker 1: His words stuck with me. As I stood in the
Speaker 1: evening light, watching three clocks bring their own hour to
Speaker 1: the end of another day. There was suddenly no sense
Speaker 1: of technical failure, only a feeling that something intentional might
Speaker 1: be at work. Some logic older than any schedule book.
Speaker 1: I began to ask not how the system failed, but
Speaker 1: how this machinery of difference could function at all. A
Speaker 1: week passed in this fresh mode. My previous lens as
Speaker 1: a critic, an engineer suspicious of inefficiency, faded, replaced by
Speaker 1: the keen ache. To understand the engine at the town's core,
Speaker 1: I resolved to test not just the mechanics, but the
Speaker 1: very intent. Was this a social compromise, a tradition, a trick,
Speaker 1: or something more. I started with the records that felt
Speaker 1: closest to my old world. The Railway Archives. Selan Grove Station,
Speaker 1: though unattended most days, keeps a leather bound ledger dating
Speaker 1: back nearly a century. It stored alongside hand written seat logs,
Speaker 1: track grants, and diagrams of the first steam approaches over
Speaker 1: the salt. The LEDs are in the neat looping script
Speaker 1: of station masters long gone revealed a double column arrangement
Speaker 1: for every entry, standard time and local clock, not just
Speaker 1: at the station, but cross reference marks bakery, school, bell
Speaker 1: hall chime scrawled in coded pencil. Trains arriving at eight
Speaker 1: zero zero standard also noted as seven fifty eight school
Speaker 1: eight zero four bakery departures similarly recorded with doctor like marginalia,
Speaker 1: all boarded bakery time post chime missus f out. Digging deeper,
Speaker 1: I found battered envelopes of old station master correspondence, mostly unremarkable,
Speaker 1: but one packet tied in green string contained exchanges between
Speaker 1: the early nineteen fifties head and then Mayor Benson. The
Speaker 1: language was formal, almost ritualistic. We must remain in harmonious difference,
Speaker 1: not to enforce, but to enable town thrives. When each
Speaker 1: keeps to their hour, Let the clock's guide passage, not
Speaker 1: to find it. Train arrivals in these records often appeared
Speaker 1: as multiples arrived one zero three school, one zero seven, bakery,
Speaker 1: all agreed on departure. There were months, oddly enough, centred
Speaker 1: on spring tides, where the differences shrank to almost nothing,
Speaker 1: then spread out again without warning. I tried a direct experiment.
Speaker 1: I convinced Tim, who ran the corner convenience shop, to
Speaker 1: open the next morning by town hall time instead of
Speaker 1: his usual post office clock. He did, grinning at the novelty.
Speaker 1: Within an hour, his regulars lined up out of sequence,
Speaker 1: early late, flatly confused by lunch time, frustrated by a
Speaker 1: complaint or two, he swapped back to his usual schedule.
Speaker 1: Felt like running on the wrong side of the road,
Speaker 1: he admitted, shaking his head. Still unconvinced, I recruited Marrable
Speaker 1: to set her shop clock forward by two minutes overnight, subtly,
Speaker 1: not enough for eyes to notice, but enough to break
Speaker 1: the routine. The following morning deliveries arrived during the rush,
Speaker 1: the first trays baked, just a hair underdone. Her regulars
Speaker 1: uncertain whether to stay or drift off, though no one
Speaker 1: could have clocked the cause. Most notably, after two failed
Speaker 1: attempts to bring clocks into agreement, first by asking the
Speaker 1: watch repair man to set his window piece to the
Speaker 1: digital clock's time, than by tweaking the school clock to
Speaker 1: match the post offices, the correction lasted only hours. Even
Speaker 1: the brand new l ed wall mount gifted by a donor,
Speaker 1: appeared to drift gradually back to its designated distinct hour,
Speaker 1: as if time itself. In Celine Grove resisted unification. I
Speaker 1: borrowed Gino's wristwatch, a railway veteran of thirty years, to
Speaker 1: run my own checks. He found it almost apologetically aligned
Speaker 1: with the station clock each morning, only to diverge gently
Speaker 1: if left elsewhere. I borrowed a mechanical clock from Hailey.
Speaker 1: The librarian, set it precisely by satellite standard at home,
Speaker 1: and placed it in her reading room. Within a day,
Speaker 1: it matched the library lobby clock two minutes fast and
Speaker 1: ticked onward, unbothered by its official baseline. I even tried
Speaker 1: swapping batteries, shielding the devices in my own bag, tucking
Speaker 1: them in unfamiliar corners, Yet the pattern persisted. In selin
Speaker 1: Grove clocks were loyal to place, not to organization. The
Speaker 1: real breakthrough came late over tea with Hazel, who, in
Speaker 1: the role of amused mentor, pulled out another trio of pamphlets.
Speaker 1: One annotated in blue ballpunt by stranger's hand, contained the
Speaker 1: phrase spring tides Stronger this Year, with a series of
Speaker 1: loose spiraling notations. Beside the clock times, the same hand
Speaker 1: made cyclical diagrams clock faces clustered close then stretching apart
Speaker 1: over a period matched uncannily to the lunar calendar. On
Speaker 1: a hunch, I laid out my own data over the
Speaker 1: past two weeks. The waxing and waning differences, the faint
Speaker 1: pulsing back and forth, My eyes lingered on the map,
Speaker 1: not quite believing what the numbers suggested. It was not
Speaker 1: a static aberration, not a mere social artifact. There was
Speaker 1: something living, if not alive, then at least dynamic at work, electronic, mechanical,
Speaker 1: wind up, digital. The type mattered, not a jot. Clocks,
Speaker 1: newly installed, ancient, antique, gifted, donated, All took up the rhythm,
Speaker 1: the only variable being their location, as if each address
Speaker 1: had its own gravitational field of time. No one cleaned
Speaker 1: or repaired these differences away, Because I saw now the
Speaker 1: system did not break. It recalibrated to the context enforced
Speaker 1: by nothing visible, and sustained as relieably as tide pulling
Speaker 1: salt water over lowland mud. I wondered, was it simply
Speaker 1: impossibly the will of people who lived here, honed over generations,
Speaker 1: shaping machines to fit their daily needs, or was the
Speaker 1: land itself saline mineral mysterio, breathing out a rhythm, one
Speaker 1: that people and gears alike responded to consciously or not.
Speaker 1: That night, I sat in my kitchen, my wristwatch lying
Speaker 1: heavy in my palm, ticking softly as if reassuring me.
Speaker 1: Through the window, I saw the lights of sail and Grove,
Speaker 1: casting their own gentle glow on the salt flats, reflected
Speaker 1: in ten thousand mirrored fragments on the fields. The clocks
Speaker 1: of the town, though invisible in darkness, seemed suddenly to
Speaker 1: pulse as a network each I thought, keeping and marking
Speaker 1: not simply time, but place and life, and some deeper
Speaker 1: harmony I had only begun to glimpse for the first
Speaker 1: time since Helen's death. I felt a shiver of real wonder,
Speaker 1: a pull toward not the comfort of answers, but the open,
Speaker 1: intricate beauty of questions that run deeper the more you
Speaker 1: follow them. If time here was not what I thought,
Speaker 1: If clocks could fall into gentle disarray yet orchestrate perfect order,
Speaker 1: then perhaps the definition of what a community needs did
Speaker 1: from time itself was more malleable than I had ever
Speaker 1: dared imagine. I would have to investigate the land itself
Speaker 1: and the stories of those brave enough to trust their
Speaker 1: own sense of flow. The heart of Seleengrove's clocks was
Speaker 1: not a fault to be fixed, but perhaps a phenomenon
Speaker 1: worth revering. And so just before dawn, I redrew my
Speaker 1: plans tomorrow, I would walk the salt flats, consult with outsiders,
Speaker 1: plot time against geography itself. I would find the edges
Speaker 1: of this quiet perfectly discordant order, because the contradiction was
Speaker 1: now undeniable. Something beyond mere habit or error shaped the
Speaker 1: time of this town, and the further I looked, the
Speaker 1: clearer it became that neither people nor machines were wholly
Speaker 1: in control. The clocks of seleeng Grove kept their time
Speaker 1: by rules, older, stranger, and more beautiful than anything I'd imagined,
Speaker 1: And I felt, for the first time at the threshold
Speaker 1: of a true, true discovery. I woke with an idea
Speaker 1: knocking at my ribs like a late night guest. The
Speaker 1: clocks in Celan Grove, so loyal to location, so resistant
Speaker 1: to outside order, had become more than a curiosity. They
Speaker 1: were pressing for explanation last night. I'd sworn to approach
Speaker 1: the problem from outside my own experience. If each clock's drift,
Speaker 1: its pulse hinted at something environmental, I owed it to
Speaker 1: both the town and my old engineers. Pried to test it,
Speaker 1: as I would any railway track thrown out of true,
Speaker 1: with careful observation, with numbers, and with help from those
Speaker 1: not yet acclimated to Selan's peculiarities, were still dark when
Speaker 1: I drove my granddaughter's battered hatchback out past the town's rim,
Speaker 1: the beams catching pale pink grit by the road's edge.
Speaker 1: The salt flats in morning's first air looked lunar gray
Speaker 1: and shining, etched with old tire treads and puddles that
Speaker 1: would evaporate by noon. I checked my phone five Z
Speaker 1: zero seven. The dashboard clock blinked five zero nine. My
Speaker 1: wrist watch reset at the kitchen just before leaving. Agreed
Speaker 1: stubbornly with neither. What influence could this mineral world have?
Speaker 1: I joked more than once about the mineral fog of
Speaker 1: old railway tunnels, how steel seemed to warp a wrist
Speaker 1: watch's mood for days after. But this was flat country,
Speaker 1: open as an outstretched palm. The salt people said was bottomless.
Speaker 1: My hope was thin, but not absent. I'd rung my
Speaker 1: old university friend, doctor Shearif the previous evening, explaining the
Speaker 1: matter as a puzzle without reference yet to folklore. You
Speaker 1: think are buried cables leaking current? Or is your new home,
Speaker 1: so exciting your inventing scientific anomalies. He was a geologist,
Speaker 1: broad nosed and sharp witted, who delighted in dismissing anything
Speaker 1: bordering on the paranormal perfect. He agreed to drive up,
Speaker 1: bringing senses and crucially, a box of digital clocks, of
Speaker 1: mechanical wind ups, and a third smaller box containing two
Speaker 1: of the university's least sensitive but most reliable atomic pocket timers.
Speaker 1: We met in the station car park at sunrise. Sharif
Speaker 1: emerged in a faded rugby shirt, hair flaming up in
Speaker 1: the breeze, cradling his clock box like a newborn. I
Speaker 1: have coffee and skepticism in bulk, he announced, before the
Speaker 1: first greeting. We set the clocks, five digital displays aligned
Speaker 1: by satellite, five mechanical wound and checked each accurate. Each
Speaker 1: tic tick ringing through the station's chilly stone. Two atomic timers,
Speaker 1: humming behind thick casings, promised accuracy that not even the
Speaker 1: London bullet lines could contest. Now you say these drift,
Speaker 1: but aren't we just seeing bad wiring? Magnetic fields can
Speaker 1: offset cheap quartz if you've got a transformer gone wild.
Speaker 1: Sharif's hands moved quickly arranging clocks on every available flat surface, station, platform, market, square, bench,
Speaker 1: a bucket on the bakery stoop. Clocks left out in public,
Speaker 1: I said, begin to match their neighbors. But those hidden
Speaker 1: away no difference, or not at first. The change only
Speaker 1: comes once there participating somehow, he squinted, not with suspicion,
Speaker 1: but with the anticipatory delight of a problem about to yield.
Speaker 1: Let's try the flats themselves, he said. We walked out
Speaker 1: across the crystalline crust salt, climbing in whirls around our boots.
Speaker 1: At three marked spots, we set a digital clock, a
Speaker 1: wind up, and an atomic timer, carefully shielded from sunlight.
Speaker 1: For control. We buried a set under an upturned tub
Speaker 1: near the edge, well away from town buildings, one digital,
Speaker 1: one mechanical, hidden isolated. So this is the environmental baseline,
Speaker 1: Sheherif muttered, snapping a thermometer on to a small stand.
Speaker 1: With luck, you'll owe me a pint for proving your
Speaker 1: simply surrounded by micro climates and wishful thinking. We returned
Speaker 1: hourly checking redoubts, logging figures in my battered notebook, Sharif's
Speaker 1: mouth curling with every uneventful result. Nothing yet, he remarked,
Speaker 1: Still abides by Greenwich's wrinkled hand. He seemed almost disappointed.
Speaker 1: But back in the square. As the day wore on
Speaker 1: and sun brought out bakers children marrable with her baskets,
Speaker 1: change crept into our array. The clocks within public view
Speaker 1: began to slide, not fast, but perceptible by halves and
Speaker 1: then full minutes. Mechanical and digital alike. Even the atomic
Speaker 1: timers began to drift, aligning closer to the clock they'd
Speaker 1: been placed nearest the bakery. Set left by the cash
Speaker 1: register crept toward the Bakeri's ornate owl time. The post
Speaker 1: offices digital began to lag, just as the building's old
Speaker 1: clock did. In contrast, those hidden out by the salt
Speaker 1: flats stayed aligned with satellite standard. No drift, no arguing
Speaker 1: with outside time. Sharif stared, his brow wrinkling above his
Speaker 1: wide nose. Quarts shouldn't be influenced by air pressure, not
Speaker 1: like this shielding or no. He wrapped the nearest digital
Speaker 1: with a knuckle, as one prods a misbehaving vending machine.
Speaker 1: All right, I admit a proper mystery. Want to stake
Speaker 1: out the bakery watch overnight for watchful mice. What if
Speaker 1: it's not just the environment, I suggested, What if attension,
Speaker 1: human or otherwise plays a part. I felt sheepish as
Speaker 1: the words left my mouth, but the pattern was unmistakable.
Speaker 1: Now you're becoming a philosopher. West. If people could change
Speaker 1: time by observation alone, we'd all live in lottery winning zones.
Speaker 1: Yet he agreed to watch eventually, if only for the
Speaker 1: pleasure of confounding me. Later, we set up a camera
Speaker 1: on the bakery's interior clock, left a digital side by side,
Speaker 1: and locked the shop. The next morning, review of the
Speaker 1: footage showed nothing but slow, steady drift. As soon as
Speaker 1: the first flower dusted hand switched on the lights, the
Speaker 1: digital clock began aligning itself to the bakery's own time,
Speaker 1: not instantly, but as unhurried as a parade. Sharif was
Speaker 1: silent for a minute, then finally shrugged. No known substance
Speaker 1: explains it. Not salt, not humidity, no stray magnets. The
Speaker 1: only anomaly is that wherever public attention converges, so two
Speaker 1: does the time. But I wouldn't publish it. They'd say
Speaker 1: we defaked it. For a postgraduate prank, we tried again
Speaker 1: with the controls. Clocks set out in town were the
Speaker 1: only ones that slouched away from satellite. Standard clocks kept
Speaker 1: in bags or under tubs out of sight stayed obedient,
Speaker 1: But the minute they sat on a shop counter or
Speaker 1: in the visible periphery of a working routine, off they went,
Speaker 1: adjusting not to real time but to the place's customary clock.
Speaker 1: My skepticism, which had taken a beating, shifted toward wonder,
Speaker 1: mixed with humility. Clever as science was. We were measuring
Speaker 1: with tools calibrated for world sized order, while something smaller,
Speaker 1: odder and more relational was at work. That week end,
Speaker 1: my daughter and grandchildren arrived, laden with a clatter of
Speaker 1: bags and the excited chatter that comes with city kids
Speaker 1: freed into new territory. They had never visited Seline Grove before,
Speaker 1: but had heard my stories, half dismissed as Grandpa's clock
Speaker 1: town tales. At first, nothing seemed strange to them. The
Speaker 1: bakery was open, the schoolyard busy, the playgrounds spilling over
Speaker 1: with laughter. Their phones, fresh from Downbridge's urban cell towers,
Speaker 1: registered official time. Their tablet alarms went off on schedule.
Speaker 1: Nothing amiss, but The next day, my eldest Myra frowned
Speaker 1: at a watch. Weird I set this to match my
Speaker 1: phone last night, but now look thereof by almost two minutes.
Speaker 1: Which one's right, Grandpa? She handed me both in the kitchen,
Speaker 1: with the station clock visible over the rooftops. I watched
Speaker 1: as slowly, without being reset, her smart watches local time
Speaker 1: began to agree with the station s, even as her
Speaker 1: phone clung to its imported truth. By afternoon, her phone
Speaker 1: too had drifted all on its own, a digital sheep
Speaker 1: joining the flock my daughter. Ever, the engineer scoffed. Probably
Speaker 1: a lingering Wi Fi signal, she said, though her smile
Speaker 1: held more curiosity than skepticism. Or the cell coverage is patchy,
Speaker 1: I'll watch for it. That night, after all had gone
Speaker 1: to bed, I found her in the kitchen, phone in
Speaker 1: one hand, railway ledger in the other. Dad, if this
Speaker 1: is a malfunction, it's consistent, and only while the phone's
Speaker 1: not in my pocket. It refuses to change if I
Speaker 1: keep it with me. But if I leave it charging
Speaker 1: on the bakery counter for an hour, bam, it's on
Speaker 1: bakery time when I pick it up, she paused, But
Speaker 1: why do none of the town's routines, ever, clash, no confusion.
Speaker 1: You'd think with clocks out of order, the school run
Speaker 1: would be chaos. It's as if they don't need a
Speaker 1: single time. I offered, only synchronization at the right moments.
Speaker 1: If you trust the right clock for each place, balance
Speaker 1: is never broken. She snorted, but her eyes sparkled. You
Speaker 1: and your railway metaphors. Fine, but who's the signalman in charge? Here?
Speaker 1: We found echoes of this observation all across Saline, No
Speaker 1: matter how off the clock seemed by outside measure. Events
Speaker 1: dove tiled mail arrived before rain storms, After school clubs
Speaker 1: met like a well oiled watch. Even newcomers, once they'd
Speaker 1: been a day or two, found themselves magnetized to the
Speaker 1: right clock for every purpose. And then, just as my
Speaker 1: mind began to accept the impossible, I stumbled upon another
Speaker 1: piece of the puzzle. Harmony Day. It began with pennance
Speaker 1: lavender and yellow, strung across the market square and a
Speaker 1: bustle in Hazel's museum. The annual festival, I learned, was
Speaker 1: dedicated to living in many times. It was an event
Speaker 1: that attracted visitors and prompted town wide multilocation scavenger hunts
Speaker 1: governed by the shifting clocks. You'll love it, dad, my
Speaker 1: daughter promised, like a miniature railway system, always changing, always reliable.
Speaker 1: The celebration began with a gathering on the church green.
Speaker 1: Marrable announced the rules. Each team was assigned a starting
Speaker 1: location and a schedule written not in terms of one
Speaker 1: official hour, but in terms of each clock's peculiar time
Speaker 1: at different stops. Meet at the post office at ten
Speaker 1: zero seven post office time, then bakery at ten twelve
Speaker 1: bakery time. No two teams follow the same pattern. The
Speaker 1: points only a line if you do its sealine style.
Speaker 1: That morning I joined the families from the Western quarter.
Speaker 1: A clues sent us looping from the school bell to
Speaker 1: the bakery's kitchen to the railway platform, each event setting
Speaker 1: our pace by the local clock. Not once did we stumble.
Speaker 1: Whole teams gathered in harmony, not by outside reckoning, but
Speaker 1: by internal rhythms. Loud speakers called out ticked off clue
Speaker 1: times eleven zero four hall clock, next clue, and every
Speaker 1: face in the crowd nodded as if borne to this system.
Speaker 1: Even vendors from out of town, unable to follow paper schedule,
Speaker 1: found themselves, guided along by townspeople or gently ushered to
Speaker 1: the correct point. There was laughter and a camaraderie I
Speaker 1: remembered from long ago railway staff picnics, when everyone trusted
Speaker 1: the right colleague to call the whistle. As Harmony day
Speaker 1: came to a close, the mayor perched on a table
Speaker 1: beside the town hall window, address in hand. Ten teams,
Speaker 1: ten paths, all arriving in harmony. This is celang Grove.
Speaker 1: Don't try to force our time to match, and we'll
Speaker 1: never collide. That's how we keep every year running. Suite.
Speaker 1: For the first time, the many clocks were not merely tolerated,
Speaker 1: but celebrated, woven deliberately into the social fabric. Here, the
Speaker 1: difference was not an error or a puzzle to solve,
Speaker 1: but a kind of cultivated advantage. I realized that even
Speaker 1: the apparent contradictions, so frustrating to my old habits, were
Speaker 1: clues to a larger purpose. The system worked not despite
Speaker 1: its divergence, but because of it. I wanted to push further,
Speaker 1: to ask at the next council meeting if anyone had
Speaker 1: tried to force unification, or what happened if an outsider
Speaker 1: simply refused the responses were more amused than distressed. Hazel,
Speaker 1: sipping tea beside her cluttered museum window, shook her head.
Speaker 1: Do you know it's been tried more times than I
Speaker 1: can count? Someone wanted the bakery and post office on
Speaker 1: the same schedule. Once place ran worse than a three
Speaker 1: legged goat. People arrived together, but the bread came out dowe.
Speaker 1: The mailman stood around with nothing to deliver. After three days,
Speaker 1: every one sighed and put things back as they had been.
Speaker 1: That was after the town hall tried for a single
Speaker 1: clock back in seventy seven. There's a note about it
Speaker 1: on page four of the visitor pamphlet. Another council member,
Speaker 1: a tall, dignified woman named missus Kats, laughed when the
Speaker 1: subject came up. A tourist once paid handsomely for a
Speaker 1: meal scheduled by her own watch. The chef came out
Speaker 1: half way through, apologized for nothing, and said the meal
Speaker 1: would arrive bakery time, not a second sooner. She left
Speaker 1: a glowing review. I arranged one week for a delivery
Speaker 1: from Downbridge, specifying official time. The shipment scheduled for nine
Speaker 1: a m arrived somehow at the precise moment that the
Speaker 1: market clock reached its hour, though by net work time
Speaker 1: they were fifteen minutes off. The truck's driver, a brick
Speaker 1: shaped man with forestruff hands, seemed unperturbed. Roads are odd here,
Speaker 1: he said, more as a fact of nature than complaint.
Speaker 1: You look up, and it's when you need to be.
Speaker 1: The more I pressed at the boundaries, the more the
Speaker 1: effect held. Even the digital shipped in Internetcinct Phones left
Speaker 1: for an hour by a public clock joined its rhythm,
Speaker 1: but those kept in private pockets or behind drawn shades
Speaker 1: held out longer, as if the local pulse couldn't permeate
Speaker 1: walls without a line of sight. Word reached me that
Speaker 1: my experiments had become a minor subject of gossip. Children
Speaker 1: came by, giggling to ask if Grandpa's clocks had found
Speaker 1: an answer. Yet Hazel sent me clippings older than my
Speaker 1: own birth, of hand written almanacs from former station masters,
Speaker 1: each recording clock differences as a routine fact of life.
Speaker 1: With each new experiment, the possibilities deepened, but turned ever stranger.
Speaker 1: None of the classic causes, electric fields, mechanical quirks, even
Speaker 1: the heavy burdens of tradition accounted for the pattern, and
Speaker 1: so I settled in for a longer perspective. I plotted
Speaker 1: clock drifts daily for weeks, pairing my findings with a
Speaker 1: stack of weather logs, humidity charts, and at Sharif's raised
Speaker 1: brow instigation, moon fhase calenders. I remembered more than once
Speaker 1: the railway men of my youth reading wooly almanacs to
Speaker 1: divine snow closures or fog banks from before the age
Speaker 1: of satellites. To my astonishment, the faint cycling I had
Speaker 1: glimpsed before grew sharper in weeks. When the moon waxed full,
Speaker 1: the discrepancies between public clocks tightened, briefly, drawing closer. As
Speaker 1: the moon waned, the differences widened, pulling apart like rowing
Speaker 1: teams at opposite banks. The salt flats, bone dry in
Speaker 1: late summer, became slick with brine in spring, and the
Speaker 1: peaks in clock divergence mirrored loosely the waxing tides. Even
Speaker 1: as I scoffed the ledger from the station echoed it
Speaker 1: spring tides stronger times Nearly in chorus on new Moon,
Speaker 1: the phrase read in three different and hands recurred every
Speaker 1: decade or so. In the notes I pulled out old
Speaker 1: railway schedules enough to build a mosaic. With careful mapping,
Speaker 1: I overlaid clock divergence by zone, over maps of salt density,
Speaker 1: local foot traffic, even train line maintenance closures. What emerged
Speaker 1: was dazzling town routines, openings, closings, arrivals partitioned themselves, not randomly,
Speaker 1: but in interlocking bands of time, braid like overlaps that
Speaker 1: guaranteed every event found space but never crowded another. When
Speaker 1: differences shrank, the town moved together. As they widened, families
Speaker 1: and friends found distance and pause. I tried modeling the pattern,
Speaker 1: drawing diagrams echoing the complex intersections of my old railways.
Speaker 1: Safe blocks, no collision, ever, as long as each kept
Speaker 1: their route. In Salein's case, the lines curved, sometimes parallel
Speaker 1: and sometimes apart, but always synchronized in a greater hole,
Speaker 1: a kind of musical polyphony. I realized, every voice ringing out,
Speaker 1: each just off from another, together making a whole richer
Speaker 1: and more responsive than any monotone chord. I began to
Speaker 1: see in the behavior of the town an emergent logic.
Speaker 1: Multiple places of time kept every life both co ordinated
Speaker 1: and a little independent. Each clock's authority mapped social flows
Speaker 1: like a tide table, and when the tides ebbed, space
Speaker 1: opened between routines. No bunched crowds, no traffic jams, no
Speaker 1: waiting in endless cues. Most remarkable, perhaps, was that no
Speaker 1: single clock could claim primacy. Even the best maintained time pieces, antique, digital,
Speaker 1: or atomic, soon found themselves at home to the social, environmental,
Speaker 1: and unspoken forces of their place. I gathered my findings,
Speaker 1: nervous and unsteady, half fearing the town would resist such
Speaker 1: outside analysis. At Hazel's prompting, I presented them to the
Speaker 1: Monday gathering at the market square. I know you all
Speaker 1: trust your clocks, I began, but I think I've begun
Speaker 1: to see why they disagree, how it all still works.
Speaker 1: The townspeople listened, some amused, some indulgent, all quiet. I
Speaker 1: laid out the evidence, the physical measurements minor but real
Speaker 1: air pressure, salt content, even lunarlinked humidity shifts, the traditions
Speaker 1: kept alive by custom and memory, and finally, the data,
Speaker 1: too stubbornly precise to discount the way even electronics left
Speaker 1: in public spaces slowly bent to the will of place,
Speaker 1: as if Seilan time was a field or a story
Speaker 1: written into the walls. I explained the polyphany, the safety bands,
Speaker 1: the living music of routine, echoing railway safe scheduling, emphasizing
Speaker 1: how no one clock governed, rather every clock contributed. A
Speaker 1: voice interlocked but never identical. Hazel, sitting primly in the
Speaker 1: front row, beamed, we just live seleng time, mister West.
Speaker 1: It's a relief to no, We're not out of order
Speaker 1: for no reason. Marrable called out from the bakery crowd.
Speaker 1: Tell me why my loaves never burn even when I
Speaker 1: open late some years, and I'll bake you a pie.
Speaker 1: My daughter hugged my granddaughter closer, as if seeing the
Speaker 1: town wholly new. So it's in the land, she whispered
Speaker 1: to me, and in the living both. But I saw
Speaker 1: something else too. The pride Celine Grove, far from being
Speaker 1: a town adrift, was tuned to a tempo that recognized
Speaker 1: and celebrated difference. It ran not on measured pulses from
Speaker 1: a central synthesizer, but on a shared living willingness to
Speaker 1: trust in each distinct voice. Their unification was achieved through difference,
Speaker 1: not at its expense. Hazel pressed a slim booklet into
Speaker 1: my hands as the meeting broke up. You've earned it now,
Speaker 1: the pamphlet, its cover ornately printed red, Welcome to Celine
Speaker 1: Time friend. Inside I found stories of families growing up
Speaker 1: to the rhythm of their cloth, generations competing in scavenger hunts,
Speaker 1: and quiet notes from those who had come from elsewhere
Speaker 1: but stayed for the harmony. I walked home that evening
Speaker 1: with new eyes. The need to impose outside standard so
Speaker 1: deeply ingrained in me had vanished. I marveled instead at
Speaker 1: what an unlikely, gentle act of genius had unfolded, a
Speaker 1: living system thriving in opposition to singular authority. Not magic,
Speaker 1: but not quite reducible to geology or electronic drift either.
Speaker 1: Like the railway safe blocks of my past, it was
Speaker 1: a mesh work of trust, context, and the subtle choreography
Speaker 1: only close observation and belonging could maintain. In the following days,
Speaker 1: I felt a lightness I hadn't known since my wife's passing.
Speaker 1: I stood sometimes at the corner of the square and
Speaker 1: watched the town in motion, clocks disagreeing, but routines, dovetilling,
Speaker 1: children caught the bus by bakery, time, bread was sold
Speaker 1: before it could even cool on the rack. Trains departed
Speaker 1: to the rhythm of their own bell, no step out
Speaker 1: of place. When the time came again to visit my
Speaker 1: daughter in Downbridge, I walked to the station with my
Speaker 1: bag light at my side. The air was, as always
Speaker 1: after rain, sharp and tinged with the taste of the
Speaker 1: world's oldest salt. Gino greeted me, still in his battered cap,
Speaker 1: still winding his station clock. You know, mister West, We're
Speaker 1: right on time as usual, he said, grinning, And this
Speaker 1: time I grinned back, not minding whether it matched satellite,
Speaker 1: or phone or anything else. In a moment of quiet mischief,
Speaker 1: I set my wrist watch, not by phone, not by
Speaker 1: railway schedule, but by the mossy faced station clock. As
Speaker 1: the sun slipped over salt into morning. For the first
Speaker 1: time in years, that felt perfectly, unmistakably right. As the
Speaker 1: train rolled over the edge of town, I glanced back.
Speaker 1: My daughter texted, laughing, Myra's watch is still on bakery time.
Speaker 1: Think it'll last the whole ride, maybe, I replied, and
Speaker 1: neither of us latched too tightly to the need to
Speaker 1: explain it. Somewhere in the distance, the salt fields shimmered
Speaker 1: beneath the rising sun. I watched as the clocks in
Speaker 1: view station, bakery, post office caught the morning glare at
Speaker 1: different moments, each glowing in sequence like a song across
Speaker 1: the roof tops. I realized, with a satisfaction much deeper
Speaker 1: than mere logic, that perhaps all time keeping is a
Speaker 1: matter of gentle context, and that in Saline Grove reality
Speaker 1: had simply made it obvious. And as the train wind
Speaker 1: carried away the taste of salt, I wondered, not from
Speaker 1: unsettlement but fascination. How many other places might carry hidden
Speaker 1: harmonies like this, unseen by those who ride through and
Speaker 1: never pause. I've stopped trusting the phrase right on time
Speaker 1: to mean just one thing. Now. With each bell that
Speaker 1: rings in every clock that falls briefly into sunlight, I imagine
Speaker 1: other towns, other unnoticed high dominies waiting to be seen.
Speaker 1: The sun behind seil and Grove flared over the horizon,
Speaker 1: and one by one the clocks marked its rise, each alone,
Speaker 1: each correct together, making time in a quiet, impossible, and
Speaker 1: perfectly human way. And that is the end. Thank you
Speaker 1: for listening, and I will see you in the next one.