February 29 is not a real day

 

Leap Day. Really?

No. It's Not.

In fact, February 29 is not a real day at all, and I have proof.

It was developed as a place holder, after all. An adjustment to keep the calendar in line with the sun and the passage of the actual astronomic year. With that purpose in mind, it was given a purpose, but no significance. All it has to do is come and go so as to keep the other days in their proper places. Nothing is supposed to happen on February 29. No one plans anything on it because it cannot have an annual anniversary. No one gets married or graduates or anything. Heaven help the person who is born on it, who is condemned to get older without getting to celebrate their actual birthday.

And this year, February 29 has proven it's non-dayness even more. Even the weather has deserted it. Today is February 28 and here in Wisconsin, Spring has already arrived. The perennials are sprouting in my garden, we've put away our winter coats, the sun will shine and the temperature will reach nearly 70 degrees. In two days, on March 1, predictions (which are usually right regardless of how much we complain to the contrary) are that it will be the same. 

But the weather on February 29 doesn't fit. It's either been transported from another dimension or has just decided to take a day off altogether. Nineteen degrees and snow. I keep looking at the forecast to decide whether someone has made a horrible mistake or is playing some kind of joke. Nope.

But in the context of the calendar, it makes a wierd kind of sense. February 29th doesn't belong.

Nineteen degrees doesn't belong.

Snow doesn't belong. 

And no one is leaping. 

It is just God's nudge to see whether we're paying attention. 

I think I'll stay in bed.

In fact, I think I'll publish this today just in case it doesn't come after all.

Building a Life, Stone by Stone

 

Did you know that when the builders in the Middle Ages erected their cathedrals with their great barrel vaults and pointed arches and flying buttresses, it was the not the mortar between the stones that kept them standing? The mortar didn't serve as medieval masonry glue but as a thin layer of leveling, smoothing the imperfections between them, one to another, to provide a continuous contact surface so that when one brick sat on the one before it and was followed by the rest, their combined weight would press them into a geometric shape whose weighted thrust extended in straight lines right through them into the ground.

It wasn't the mortar that kept the building together. It was the horde of gradually assembled stones that wouldn't work until each had taken its place. Not until that had happened, and the stones had time to sink into one another firmly by virtue not of a masonry glue, but only by their own accumulated pressure, would the great soaring structure be finished.

And so it is that the weight of years forms a life.

It has often seemed that as the years of my life increase, so does the weight of them so that I carry them as a kind of burden, like a sack I have to throw over my back before I can go anywhere. But I've been looking at them wrong, I think. Maybe they aren't a burden, but a building - a magnificent cathedral of lived days that I don't carry, but live in, roaming its rooms, examing its structure, admiring its beauty. Each stone has been laid painstakingly on the one before it day by day, adding weight, yes, but also creating stability. 

My building isn't complete yet until I've lived my last day, but it is taking shape into something I couldn't see coherently until now, when the building is nearly complete. What began as a fortress has morphed into a cathedral of Gothic lace, and I can't help but think that is what it was meant to be all along. 

And it is beautiful.