In response to my email announcing that this month’s topic for the Productivity & Organizing Blog Carnival would be Time Wisdom, Judith Kolberg, who is well-known in the organizing industry, sent me a funny story about time from her own life.

Normally, I only accept submissions that have already been published on a blog, but I loved her story, so I’ve shared it here (with Judith’s permission), and I hope you’ll enjoy it too.

Throughout most of my life, my mother wore a watch, not always as a timepiece, but more as a fashion accessory.

As the years went by, she wore the watch less and less. By the time she was 100 years old she was pretty atemporal, not taking much interest in the passage of time at all, and it aggravated her skin which was becoming quite thin as she aged. Ultimately, she put the watch aside altogether.

And then when she was 101 years old, she asked me, “Where is my watch? I want to wear it.”  Not everything a 101 year old says is logical, but my desire to please Mom in her final years always trumped making sense of what she said, so I went on a hunt for her watch. She had a massive amount of jewelry, nothing expensive, mostly thrift store finds and costume jewelry accumulated over many decades. I found her favorite watch, a large-faced one with a wide band that was, remarkably, still working.

She was delighted. Several days later she called me. “It’s broken. The watch is broken” she said. I figured it’s probably the battery. I mean the thing has got to be as old as my bell-bottoms. When I visited her at the assisted living center, she held up her arm showing me the watch on her wrist. “See”, she said, “It’s broken. Every time I look at it, it says a different time.”  I could not help laughing out loud.

Stifling the laughter, Mom and I scoured her jewelry box and found an appealing watch with a rundown battery. The hands were stuck at 2:00. She wore it until a few weeks before her death at the age of 103.

Time waits for no one, but it did hang on a bit for my Mom.

Image by Sabine van Erp from Pixabay