TIME AND WINGS

MORNING WINGS

     An early tennis call will get you places and show you things you might otherwise miss.

Morning light is pure, infused with all the hopes of a day just dawning.

     A Monarch butterfly may share the quick taste of sweet light with you.

     Monarchs return to the Central Coast this season. This one is absorbed in the work of making the most of our Tea Tree bush.   A beautiful meditation on wing.

OTHER FLIGHTS AND PASSAGES

LIKE TIME RE-TOOLED

     New ticks from old time pieces have come to our place in the highlands.  Two family clocks with history are alive again with a cadence of the of time. It is a heartbeat of generations.

     This piece was a wedding gift in the 1899 Bernfeld-Schroeder wedding which led to the birth of Lana's mother Mabel in 1910. In 1911 a fire overtook the families general store and home in Smithson Indiana.  Mabel was vacated to beneath an apple tree while family and neighbors moved objects out of the burning wood frame building. This cast iron clock, painted to look like marble, was pulled from the home and placed under the apple tree with baby Mabel.  

     This banjo clock is from my side of the family, the Cochrun-Jones connection.  This piece hung in the house of my grandmother Mary Elizabeth Jones Cochrun, the widow of Thomas E.,  who shared the house with her sisters, Anna Jones and her husband Edward Cochrun who was also my grandfather's brother, Martha Jones McGibbeny and her husband Clarence Pete McGibbeny, and their widowed sister Sarah.

     It is a Warwick Timepiece, made by the New Haven Clock company.  New Haven was an off shoot of a company formed by Chauncey Jerome, noted for creating the first inexpensive American brass clock movement.  Jerome was America's largest clock maker by the 1850's.  Business deals, buy outs and permutations led to the move to New Haven Conn. in 1844.  A business partnership with P.T. Barnum led to Jerome's financial demise in 1885. Before that Jerome and his New Haven Clock Company produced thousands of clocks.  In 1860 it produced 170 thousand clocks.  In the 1880's they had sales offices in Chicago, Liverpool and Yokohama.

     My grandmother, born in England in 1879, came with her sisters and mother to American in 1889.  Her father and eldest brother were already here.  The clock could have been purchased in England, as they lived in Warwick and sailed from Liverpool. Where it was purchased is lost in history.  But it has been in the family for decades.  A New Haven catalog from the 1930's lists the Warwick as Mahogany finished with eight-day lever timepiece movement. I remember the clock from my childhood visits to the "house," as we referred to the large house in Muncie Indiana where they all lived in the manner of an English boarding house.

     It has hung in our home for years but it was not until Jay and Susan Foreman of the Hands of Tyme in Cambria took it under their care that it began to beat out a rhythm of time.  We thank Jay and Susan for bringing old time to life and for their helpful research.