Grandma says time is a sentinel tree, marked with invisible rings inside, its straggly branches extending into the infinite sky, never perfect, never linear. In the span of a sentence a storyteller can jump back and forth centuries, as if a millennium could pass in the blink of an eye. But then it takes hours to describe a single event, every minute a stretch, an eternity. “Remember, my heart. Story-time is different from clock-time.” Clock-time, however punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive. It runs under the illusion that everything is moving steadily forward, and the
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