Time: so noted.

            Every year since I was about 13 or so, I've been marking three particular days in my mind.  It's become a bit of a private ritual for me, and it helps me perceive a bit of perspective and rhythm in the passing of time.  On each of those days, I get a bit reflective and appreciative.  For me, the rest of the year pivots around those three anchors; they keep me mindful and re-engage me in the meta-experience of life.

* * * Spring * * *

            The first of those special days usually falls in late February--at least, it does in Atlanta: it's the first day the daffodils bloom.  I've adored daffodils since I was a little kid, and for several very good reasons.  I love that they're the very first vestige of spring.  The weather begins to warm, but you don't think about it.  It seems like just another temperature fluctuation, and you don't recognize the weather's springward vector.  Then one day you leave the house, and WHAM--it's the daffodils' opening day!  That moment, for me, feels like an army of four-year-olds rushing at me and hugging my knees in a fit of rapturous abandon.  GORGEOUS.

            Some years, I happen to notice the buds poking out of the ground a few days before the big moment.  In some ways, it disappoints me; it takes away some of the magic of the big reveal.  But at the same time, it provides me with a different kind of warm-and-fuzziness.  It's like sitting in the audience five minutes before the lights go down and catching a glimpse of the little kids you've come to see stealing nervous glances around the side of the curtain.  When the buds reveal themselves to me prematurely, I feel like I've been made privy to a thrilling secret by an excited little kid who--let's face it--didn't have a prayer of keeping the secret much longer anyway.  It charms me to the core.

            Whether or not the buds spoil the surprise, the first day the daffodils bloom is absolutely magical to me.  And the very best part is that there are more of them every year!  You plant some bulbs once, and every successive year, even more beatific little cups-and-saucers appear, as if ready for a tea party.  They require no maintenance; they're just thrilled to show up to work each spring, and they'll stand there grinning and waving at you for weeks.  Supposedly that proverb about March coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb came from the locations of Leo and Aries at that time of year, but I don't care.  In my mind, the proverbial March lion has an exuberant six-pointed mane and a trumpeted orange snout.

            Good LORD, how I love daffodils.

* * * Summer * * *

            The second day every year that stands out for me is the first day I see fireflies.  Where I come from, those drunken little lanterns start stumbling around on Mother's Day, plus or minus a week, and they too signal the turning of the season.  But they also ride in on the breeze of another equally magical change: twilight.  Have you ever noticed that?  You never see the first fireflies of the season at night; it's always at twilight.  At that time of year, the weather has been warmish for a couple weeks, but you haven't gotten to enjoy most of the best parts of the summer.  It's not hot enough to swim yet, the school year is still in its stressful final throes, and vacation seems like a privilege that--for drones like you--exists only in fantasies.  But oooh, those summer evenings, with their zaftig twilight.

            The planet plods steadily along its orbit, and by the time the fireflies have fully slept off last year's hangover, the vernal equinox is six weeks in our past.  Six weeks!  Somehow, daylight has been trumping darkness for six weeks already; maybe it's just been too rainy for us to notice.  But sure enough, as the earth chaînés toward the summer solstice, the days grow longer, and a curious thing befalls us.  Well...it befalls me, at least.  And it never fails.

            Sometime during the winter, the sunset becomes my productivity Zeitgeber.  Every day, I'll spend the late afternoon slacking off...but inevitably, my dull-as-a-dishrag supervisor, sunset, comes sniffing around my cubicle.  And begrudgingly, like most disgruntled employees, I decide that gainful employment (well...in my case, it's education) is something I probably ought to hang onto.  So I heave a pained sigh and resign myself to my work.  Such is my pattern all winter.

            But long about March, my supervisor-slash-slavedriver begins to make his rounds a little bit later every day.  Accordingly, I enjoy a couple more minutes of procrastination each day before darkness and his shrewish wife, cold, show up to ruin my fun.  But soon enough, there comes a day when I notice that--how did that happen??--suddenly it's 8pm, and I haven't even thought about that paper due tomorrow.  Whoopsie!  While I wasn't paying attention, my dull supervisor has morphed into a cranky toddler.  And that toddler...well.  Her bedtime is An Event.  The ritual begins later every night, and it it lasts longer, too.

            By the time we flip the calendar page to May, sunset has become its very own segment of the day.  No longer a discrete barrier between daylight and darkness, sunset is now best characterized by the romantic (and completely diva-licious) term twilight.  We've taken three-quarters of a perisolar journey since summer, and we've forgotten just how lovely twilight can be.  To wit: inspired by the mild temperature and pleasant heaviness of the air when they arrive home from work, people do silly, antiquated things like eating dinner on their porches (gasp!) and taking evening walks with their families (egad!!).  It's then--somewhere near the halfway point between equinox and solstice--when the cold and the day-swallowing darkness finally admit their defeat and allow themselves to be stuffed into trunks in the attic.  For a few months, anyway.  The only thing is, when the last chill is over and we're in the home stretch toward summer, I never seem to notice it.

            But you know who does notice it, of course.

            The fireflies.

            That's why the first fireflies of the year thrill me like they do.  For the most part, all the things that make spring spring and summer summer bleed into each other so seamlessly that I don't even perceive the balance shift.  But when those long-dormant fireflies rub their eyes, smack their sleep-sticky lips, and lift drowsily into the air--right then is when the passage of time becomes salient.  That's when summer becomes imminent.

            When the fireflies first take to the air, most of the festivities that make summer so deliriously delicious are still a few weeks off.  "But"--with a nod to a felicitous treatise by history's greatest philosophers, Olsson and Zuko--"oh, those summer nights."  In most people's schemas of "summer," the most prominent characteristics are probably the highly photographable ones: vacations, fireworks, pool parties, and so on.  But whence cometh the joie de vivre required to finance such photogenic frolicking?

            I contend that it comes from lovely, syrupy summer twilight.  And lest we be too busy or stressed or cranky to notice the glamorous yearly makeover of twilight, there are whole herds of arthropods with glowing butts who are there to herald it.  How painfully wonderful is that?

* * * Fall * * *

            My third anchor day--the third day each year when the passage of time is pungently salient to me--happens in late September.  September might be my very favorite month, as it's saturated with all kinds of good things: playgrounds, birthday parties, fresh starts, nostalgic endings, bouquets of freshly-sharpened pencils.  But my favorite thing about September is its sense of promise and anticipation.  Nineteen years as a professional student have molded my life into a permanent circannual rhythm that begins when the school year begins; consequently, the ninth month feels much more like the first month than the first month does.  From my current perch, September 28th, I can see for miles ahead of me.  There's something about the limitlessness of that future that makes me overflow with contentment.  You know what I'm talking about...that sitting on the front porch, glass of lemonade, watching the sunset kind of contentment.

            September holds all kinds of promise, and that's enticing enough.  But beyond that, it also happens to straddle my two favorite seasons.  If I had my way, every month would begin in the summer and end in the fall; it's really quite a perfect arrangement, don't you think?  And that exact moment when summer reclines into fall, as I'm sure you've guessed, is my third little anchor.

            It's probably the smell of rotting leaves; I don't know for sure.  I suppose it's a bit macabre that the smell of death fills me with such bliss.  But whatever the actual molecule is, the first time it alights on my nose's chemoreceptors, I nearly pee my pants with excitement.  The smell of fall!  The smell of swingsets and trick-or-treating and fireplaces and pumpkin pie and back-to-school sales!  That smell is like the soundtrack (smelltrack?) to my favorite movie: it's the plot, the characters, and the setting that I fell in love with, but it's been boiled down and concentrated until it's so potent that the tiniest hint is all I need (and, under the right circumstances, it's almost all I can bear).  It's so potent that for a split second, it commands all my attention.  Every year there's a particular day when it first smells like fall, yet every year, the experience almost knocks me off my feet.  For me, that first fall smell--and the crisp wind that brings it--are the perfect harbingers of fall and its attendant excitement.

            So far this year, two of my three time fulcrums have come and gone. I don't know if fall in Seoul will have the same smell to it--there are far fewer trees here than anywhere else I've lived, and they're of different varieties--but I'm anxious to find out.
            Two days ago, we had the first chilly morning since I've been here, and it arrived quite suddenly. It was one of those mornings where you open your front door, say "good lord!" and retreat inside for a costume change. (Well...that's hyperbole. But it was quite surprising nonetheless.) And today, I spent the remarkably beautiful afternoon outside grading papers...but by the time the sun set, my beflip-flopped toes and holey-jeans-clad legs were screaming at me to go inside already. Y'all, it was COLD! I hope that familiar smell of fall comes to Seoul, and I hope it comes soon. There's a swingset I've had my eye on for weeks, and decaying foliage filling my nose would provide the perfect circumstances for trying it out.

* * * Winter * * *

            In case you were wondering, there is no prototypical moment that I mark for winter.  The reason is probably a combination of the insidiousness of its onset and, of course, its utter lack of redeeming qualities. (Another potential reason: my vitriolic hatred of winter and its stupid, stupid cold weather. That might be related...)

* * * * * *

            Time is inevitable and adamant in its progress, of course.  (Bob Dylan told me so.)  I can't fully understand the scale of time, let alone control it.  But despite that, three times a year, I'm blindsided by a wonderful opportunity: the opportunity to be boosted out of my myopic vantage point and glimpse the passage of time on a grander scale.

            The first day the daffodils bloom, the first day I see fireflies, and the first day it smells like fall have become little treasures I collect each year.  Those particular days are sentimental for me, but I don't think their selection is entirely idiosyncratic.  Change is acutely tangible on those three days.  They lie tangent to the march of time.

            I gain a bit of perspective on those three days, and that perspective becomes richer with each additional year that I undertake this little mind exercise.  Being mindful of those days somehow makes me feel centered.  It invites me to pause for a minute and just observe...observe and connect.  And that mindfulness has taught me to be more appreciative of the beautiful little moments that bloom in the cracks of daily life.