Time in Owtdare

The Land Doesn’t Keep Time

No one counts days. No one asks what time it is. Instead, they look up, listen to the birds, or feel it in their bones.

The Land doesn’t keep time, it doesn’t need to.

The trees don’t count days. The mushrooms don’t mark weeks.

When the frost settles deep and the frogs go quiet, that’s how the world knows winter has come.

And when the Swinko overflows and the dragonflies hum again… that’s how spring remembers itself.

Folk in Owtdare don’t bother much with calendars.

They speak of moons — full and glowing, or hidden and waiting.

They speak of the hush before snow.

The first sap rising.

The long light that won’t quite go out.

If you ask when something happened, you’ll hear:

‘It was during the moon of falling leaves,’

or

‘Two nights after Greentide, when the bees first came back.’

Because here, time is not counted.

It is noticed.

And when a year or more has passed, they’ll say:

or

‘Since the bad storm broke the river path,’

Events mark the seasons more than numbers do, and stories root themselves in memory like moss on stone. Folk remember not when something was, but what the world was like when it happened.