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.

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

In the life-altering days, weeks, and months of the pandemic, time has new meaning. To fill our days, get outdoors, and get some exercise, we’ve been walking. A lot.

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.

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