Your Days are Numbered

With 365 days in a calendar year, which ones would I number? Toss my age into some Minnesota math and I have been around 18250 days all told, give or take a few. You can age yourself by moons as well. Im up around 650 total, lunar-ly speaking.

So if you’re like me with a fulltime job and a perpetual thirst for anything and everything out of doors there just isn’t enough days to go around. Fishing, I get in over 200 hundred partial days a year. Work days add up to 240 full days. Trapping if I’m lucky maybe twenty. My wisdom calculator agrees completely with me on this negative balance.

Deer hunting lasts 16 days, ducks, I get about thirty days before freeze up. My home heating season all kidding aside is really close to 180 days and summer possibly half that. I shovel snow at least thirty times in a winter and my lawn mowing far exceeds 16 times. I have some numbered days that add up to well below zero here.

Grouse hunting, trapping, spearing, berry picking or firewood cutting in a good year make me feel less of a sentient being to time management. While it makes good sense to earn a living and provide for my daughter it just goes against the internal grain of which I am to work so much in life, to miss so much of the outdoor life, I aspire too. This is the part where I thought the older I’d get, the smarter I would become.

I heard a lady last week say life is like a roll of toilet paper, that the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes. “Number”, the word: it means “a figure used in counting”. If that’s the case I am glad I don’t know the day my “number” is up. Toss in the fact that most of us sleep a third of our life away, that roll is spinning out of control.

How do we slow it down when every 24 hours I take another lap? Tree rings don’t spin out of control as they quietly track time. Geese come and go about twice a year. Maybe those glaciers have the right idea after all.

We all know those folks with a clock on every wall and the nicest wrist watch you’ve ever seen, but I’m becoming more of a calendar guy. The watch tells me what time it is, and the calendar tells me what days lie ahead.

We only get one day at a time. So from today on my days are all going to be numbered “One”.