As Philadelphians, we had been teachers, shoppers, socializers, therapy attenders, bus catchers. And all of these things require an awareness of the clock and of the calendar. You have to know it’s Monday, and you have to know it’s noon, if you are going to get to your Monday 1 p.m. appointment. But even after only a month or two in the farmhouse, we started shedding that awareness. It was so rare for it to matter much whether it was Tuesday or Sunday. We stopped our Wednesday night candle lightings. The rhythm was wrong. We weren’t living in seven-day cycles anymore. Not in cycles at all. Even my body gave up its cycles, my reproductive potential stuttering to an early stop as if in acquiescence to its pointlessness. I still kept track of daylight, of course, noticing, as painters must, when each day dimmed, but that is a gradual, unpunctuated sort of way to measure time. Occasionally, though, there was a reason to keep track. The morning after we had dinner with Alison, I realized it had been two weeks since I’d visited my father—though it was a funny thing to measure.
