Joyce Sutphen: "The Book of Hours"

There was that one hour sometime

in the middle of the last century.

It was autumn, and I was in my father's

woods building a house out of branches

and the leaves that were falling like

thousands of letters from the sky.

And there was that hour in Central Park

in the middle of the seventies.

We were sitting on a blanket, listening

to Pete Seeger singing "This land is

your land, this land is my land," and

the Vietnam War was finally over.

I would definitely include an hour

spent in one of the galleries of the

Tate Britain, looking up at the

painting of King Cophetua and

the Beggar Maid, and, afterwards

the walk along the Thames, and

I would also include one of those

hours when I woke in the night and

couldn't get back to sleep thinking

about how nothing I thought was going

to happen happened the way I expected,

and things I never expected to happen did—

just like that hour today, when we saw

the dog running along the busy road,

and we stopped and held on to her

until her owner came along and brought

her home—that was an hour well

spent. Yes, that was a keeper.



"The Book of Hours" by Joyce Sutphen. Published online by The Writer's Almanac, September 9, 2007. © Joyce Sutphen. 

Art credit: "Greg Cook and Coco," photograph taken March 2, 2012, by Gary Cosby Jr./AP Photo/The Decatur Daily (originally color).