Strangely enough when my turkshead bracelet fell off last week, I had one of those “mom’s apple pie” moments. Having grown up in a house where, if my memory serves me, we were never without some sort of pet. Whether it was Iguanas, fish, hampsters, guinea pigs, rats, mice, parrots, cats, dogs, or even a pigeon; we were always packing some sort of food that we found strangely inedible. In fact, I don’t ever remember learning that there were seven dog years for every one human year( I’ve subsequently learned that’s not agreed fact; source 1 & 2, but rather something I just understood. I remember thinking about that, and wondering well, that’s kinda weird, because then it doesn’t snow for them every year, but rather as frequently as the locusts come for us! Wow and I thought my wait for christmas was long…
In the subsequent years I’ve often pondered the existance of other years. Are there glass years? Take the average life of a human over of a glass and voilà you have the number of glass years in human years. So by this logic things with a higher turnover tend to age really quickly. Grapes for instance last about two, three weeks at the most so to make it a nice round number, we’ll say they last .05 years:
75(?) hys / .005 gys = 15,000 or if you break it down, a grape lasting half a year is the equivalent of a person lasting to 100!
Food years tend to be high and are fun to figure out, other things are harder to figure out like computer paper, (you gotta be specific, because newspaper, or toilet paper are a whole different ballgame!) because some gets used right away—an unfortunate victim of bad ideas, or ill expressed concepts, quickly crumpled and tossed into the receptical with it’s felled comrads. Others may be used for a term paper giving them anywhere from a week to 50 years (whence they’re pulled from some dusty box, quickly overlooked for sentimental value and then recycled). Still others, may be fortunate enough to be used for some special letter, from the beginning of a relationship and sprayed with perfume. Every once in a while unfolded smelled, and read.
So last week when my turkshead bracelet of a year and two months fell off; in part as a result of general decay in part a result of my pulling it it for the smell of the decay, when suddenly occured to me, how old is it in bracelet years? and like the wofting olfactory sensation of mashed apples and cinnamon, memories took over my vision and made me feel warm fuzzies.