When the cuckoo chimes ... a story about keeping time and finding inspiration

It's Daylight Saving Time today ... and I'm reminded of my night in the house of clocks ...

When the cuckoo chimes
I once spent the night in a house that had a cuckoo clock and a grandfather clock ... and I didn't sleep a wink.

The cuckoo clock chirped every hour on the hour, and again every half hour.

The grandfather clock was set to strike four times an hour:
- every hour on the hour
- at a quarter past the hour
- at the half hour
- and once again at a quarter to the hour

I tossed and turned all night.

My mind reeling not so much from the different chimes, but from my inability to fix a pattern to the sounds of the cuckoo clock and the grandfather clock ... I didn’t know a grandfather clock sounds four(!) times an hour.

On one of our more recent walks, we scuffed through a walkway littered with pine cones. The kind of pine cones that hang from a cuckoo clock and make it tick.

My grandparents had a cuckoo clock with pine cone weights, and that cuckoo clock where I spent the night had them, too.

I’d always seen the weights and the clocks as one.

But when I saw so many pine cones scattered across the walkway, I saw them as the cuckoo-clock maker must have seen them, inspiration for the weights and keeping time.

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