Sundials. What are they? Most people have seen one at some point, probably in a garden. They tell time using the sun. That is what they do. They have been around for a very long time. How long? A long time.
I was thinking about sundials the other morning while enjoying my coffee — a cup I ground and brewed myself, I might add, since the staff at the Hotel Boomsie now charges seventy-five cents extra for a dark roast, which is highway robbery, even for Moose County. Koko was sitting on the windowsill staring at a patch of sunlight moving across the kitchen floor. He tracked its progress with a precision that would humble the astronomers at the Lockmaster observatory. Was he calculating the solar azimuth? One does not question Koko. One simply observes and takes notes.
My moustache tingled. This usually means something, and it did. It meant I should write about sundials.
Pickax, for a town of three thousand, has seven sundials in public spaces, which seems like a lot. It also has had fourteen arsons, nine burglaries, and four murders in the last eighteen months, which also seems like a lot, though no one mentions it at the dinner parties I occasionally attend — free of charge, naturally, as a gesture of community goodwill toward the Qwill Pen and the K Fund, which has generously underwritten the restoration of several of those sundials. A perfectly reasonable use of charitable resources. Sundials are cultural heritage. The tax implications are straightforward. My accountant assures me of this.
Do sundials work at night? No. Do they work when it is cloudy? Also no. Are they therefore useless most of the time in Moose County? One could argue yes.
Yum Yum knocked a decorative sundial paperweight off my desk this afternoon and it shattered. She then looked at me as though she had done me a tremendous favor. Perhaps she had. Perhaps she was telling me this column was finished.
Speaking of which — someone has been stealing birdseed from the feeder outside the barn again. I have my suspicions. I always have my suspicions. They usually prove correct, though the resulting investigations do tend to end with someone falling off a cliff or into an abandoned mineshaft. Coincidence, obviously.
Sundials.
Leave a Reply