30 More Seconds

To my mom, in honor of the Winter Solstice.

Every Tuesday, for seven years, my mother dropped me off and waited while I went to my piano lesson. Every so often she would come in to listen, but mostly, she just sat in the car. I often wondered why she didn’t try to run errands, why she rarely brought the Southern Living or Grisham novel she happened to be reading, why she didn’t bring work to do in the car. She just waited. She never seemed to mind.

Weeks and months slipped by, seasons faded one into the next and rolled into years as every week she waited in the car. There was a certain cyclical rhythm to it, as steady and certain as my piano teacher’s metronome. Week after week, as I worked my way through the intricacies of Bach Inventions and Chopin Nocturnes, the hour from 6 to 7 pm belonged only to my mother. No distractions, no demands. Just my mother and the world, slowly and subtly shifting around her. Waiting in the car, she was the axis around which a changing world spun: a constant witness to the slow slide of light into darkness as winter’s sleepy death approached, a constant witness that inevitably, miraculously, the light of spring would once again awaken and steal surreptitiously back into the world before exploding in the full-blown dazzling warmth of the summer sun. For years this unfolded around her, this slow dance of seasons and light, as she sat waiting in the car.

One day, in the brutal, slushy cold of February, when the days seem the greyest, I asked my mom what she thought about while she waited. “Did you know,” she said, “that there were 30 seconds more light today than there were yesterday?” I just sat and looked at her, dumbfounded. That was what she thought about? “And,” she continued, “there will be 30 more seconds tomorrow, too.”

In the hours and hours that she spent waiting for me while I plowed my way through tedious scales and chords, she was pondering the rotation of the sun and the earth and the inevitable creeping forward of one season into another? I don’t know what I thought she was going to say. Looking back, perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me. Never one to shirk responsibility, my mother worked long hours and brought more work home at the end of the day. She made sure dinner was on the table, the bathroom was clean, the dogs were fed and the permission slip was signed. She even did her best to get me to practice the piano. A swirl of never-ending deadlines and demands dogged her every moment—except for the one hour a week when all of it melted away, usurped by the play of shadows and light as they shifted and slid across the mountain landscape right before her eyes.

In the bleak, dreary darkness of a February winter, my mother’s comment bore witness to a faith—as old as humanity—that the sun would return, that winter’s gloom would yet again succumb to the sweet, still freshness of spring, to the bright, bold vibrancy of summer. My mother knew this, for she had seen it and pondered it—one hour a week—for years. And like a plant whose leaves open and close with the rising and setting of the sun, she was preparing herself to break out of the confines of winter’s darkness and into the light—to open, to stretch, to grow and to live.

Today is the winter solstice. It will be darker—longer—today than any other day of the year. Like my mother, I will welcome it, knowing that tomorrow will bring 30 seconds more daylight, and the promise of new beginnings.