Miss Juanita's Clocks

I was aware of a warm, gentle presence in the world all around me, even as I stood beside the pond in the side yard of Miss Juanita's house, next door to Nana's on Dorchester Avenue.

As I stared at the flat, still water, I felt God's presence, though I'm not sure I knew it was Him at the time. At first I associated it with the pleasure of being alone and thought it was just the way it was to be by myself. I sought time to be alone, out there in the yard deep in thought.

Miss Juanita collected clocks, which fascinated me, though I was only allowed into her house once. On that one occasion I was scared. Just the sense of how it smelled in there overwhelmed me, not to mention the rooms pressing me with new and different sensations.

There is something about being in someone else's house, especially when it is forbidden and mysterious with the ticking of clocks, wonderfully strange. I remember gloom of little side porches and shadow under the dining room table on that one day when Miss Juanita invited me in.

Nana had told her I wanted to see the clocks, and so one late afternoon in early Spring at a few minutes past five o'clock, Nana led me around the side yard to the door that opened on Miss Juanita's receiving room and from there down a dim hall and into one of the side porches thick with combined ticking from shelves and shelves of clocks. There were very many of them ticking, their tiny gears spinning, scratching, rasping in the shadowed room.

Mesmerized and torn by shyness, I couldn't relax. Miss Juanita was in the room, inspecting the clocks as though she was their marshal, and Nana observed me as she chatted. Both of them watched me closely, lest I touch or stumble into them. I was dizzy and self conscious in the complicated world of Miss Juanita's clocks.

Each clock was unique. Each was slightly different and represented a variation in what it means to be. Each one represented another shade in how it was to be there, spinning through time. This was a secret world, as though Miss Juanita had led me into a complicated master control room for all of time--the world as it was in her house.

I was only allowed to walk through the first floor rooms. I didn't go upstairs, but I sensed that this time was a presence in the entire house. It was like going back in all the time implied in the shadows on her veranda, the slow stillness of time where there was nearly always just the hint of scratchy mint and vines and earth. There was the thoughtfulness of how it was to be there in that world, nearly as though we had slipped up on tiptoe to some other world. That's how it was.

I longed to return but knew I could not. Miss Juanita was very mistrustful of children and sent messages through Nana that we were not to be skulking around her yard and particularly not near her goldfish pond. I was drawn there, though. Something powerful drew me, perhaps the long hanging vines and tempting bushes, or the way light played down through the trees. There was also the knowledge that somewhere in there, in her house, was a world I had never observed except on that one April afternoon.

And there were the clocks. I wanted badly to get in there and be with the clocks all by myself. Just to be there with them and experience time as it was in that house.