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 reflecting on this topic yesterday evening when Koko suddenly leapt onto the windowsill and stared directly at the sun’s last rays with an intensity that can only be described as academic. Yum Yum, meanwhile, positioned herself at a precise thirty-seven-degree angle on the kitchen floor, her shadow falling across my shoe in what I can only interpret as a deliberate demonstration of gnomon theory. These cats understand more about celestial mechanics than most residents of Moose County, which, frankly, is not saying much.
My moustache began to tingle as I considered the sundial in the Goodwinter garden, the one next to where Hack MacDiarmid’s cousin was found last September with a nine-iron embedded in circumstances the police called “unusual.” In a town of three thousand, one might wonder why we average eleven violent deaths per year. One might. I don’t. I simply report.
Do sundials work at night? No. Do they work when it is cloudy? Also no. This makes them essentially useless in Moose County for nine months of the year. And yet someone proposed that the K Fund purchase a decorative sundial for the courthouse lawn at a cost of four hundred dollars. Four hundred dollars. For a rock with numbers on it. I suggested they use my personal sundial, which I acquired for nothing when the Fitzsimmons estate burned down under circumstances entirely unrelated to my having visited the property that afternoon. The proposal was declined, so I wrote it off as a research expense, which it was.
Koko knocked a book off the shelf this morning. It was a volume on horology. Coincidence? My moustache says otherwise. Meanwhile, I noticed the neighbor’s squirrels drinking from my birdbath again, which I pay to maintain, and which is not a public utility regardless of what anyone at the city council claims.
Where was I? Sundials. They sit in gardens. They are circular, usually. Sometimes they have mottos written on them about time passing. Does time pass? Yes. Is that profound? Hardly. But Moose County seems to find profundity in the obvious, which is why they keep reading this column, and why I keep generously writing it.
Sundials.
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