The Widow's Clock

I was attempting to create a composition that involved all four seasons. The plan was to do it without mentioning the seasons by name but, like most of my plans, things changed.

The widow found her worn clock tucked into the deep of a dresser drawer.  She pulled it free and ran her aging fingers across the scarred wood surrounding the pearlescent oval face, long ago ceasing the eternal spiral of time.  She caught her reflection in the fogging glass.  She had always imagined herself as youthful, particularly about the eyes.  But there was no imagining what she saw.  She was an old woman and no child or adult would confuse her for anything but.

A hinge was exposed at the back of the old clock and she caressed it comfortingly and slid her fingers to the latch for the first time in ages.  Within were relics from another time, another world.  The faces on photographs soft and youthful, especially about the eyes.  Herself and him.  In that other season, when things grew wild, unruly.  Passion, a necessity, not a luxury.  Her hands trembled slightly and she lost hold of the old clock.  It fell to the floor and burst into splinters like the collected wood of late Summer, headed for Fall, when planning for the cold is done in the remnant warmth.  Planners wisdom.

The photographs remained in her ashen hand with knuckles that continued to grow with time.  She smiled sadly into the eyes of the past, remembering something that would never be suspected by those who saw her, in her proper Winter.  something locked away like youthful photographs within an old wooden clock.  Something she knew we all kept as secrets.  Though we travel at regular speed through the seasons of our lives, there is nothing so hard to stomach as Winter reflecting upon Spring.