The ice left beautiful Hubbard Lake ahead of time this year.

The time to mow my lawn came at an earlier time, too.

I just celebrated another birthday, which seems to have come around in a shorter time from my last birthday. My “little” granddaughter, stuck in my mind as a 7-year-old cutie dressed in a fairy costume, told me she just put her deposit in for her freshman year of college.

Neighbor Mark, while sitting on his patio enjoying an adult beverage, looked up at the trees with the ready-to-open buds and said, “We’ll be raking leaves before you know it.”

“Slow down, Neighbor Mark! We haven’t even enjoyed the shade those leaves will give us on the hot summer days,” I pleaded.

That got me to thinking.

The days in the spring are getting longer now, giving us more time. We have already set our clocks for daylight savings time, giving us even more time.

So where is it?

Where is all that extra time? I think it has gone missing.

Is that the next crisis? Forget global warming and pandemics for just a moment, and let’s get our heads around the obviously out of control speeding-up of time!

As a child, it seemed like summers lasted forever, yet I would hear my parents say that, the older they got, the faster time passed. I didn’t believe them. Little did I know then that they were on to something.

Now, I look in the mirror each morning at an old retired guy that was supposed to have time on his hands, and I wonder why my to-do list has more on it than there are hours in the day.

Maybe it’s just me. Am I the only one who is short of time? Is it a side effect of my recent COVID-19 vaccinations? Maybe it’s something in the water. Could it be my new blood pressure pills? Maybe there is a glitch in the power grid that is speeding up all my clocks. Whatever it is, we need to figure it out, because I am running out of time.

Maybe centibillionaire Elon Musk, who is revolutionizing transportation and space travel, or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Microsoft’s Bill Gates can figure out a way to increase time. Maybe we could add time to the New York Stock Exchange and trade it as a commodity, allowing us to buy more time.

Or maybe Congress could pass another $2 trillion plan and send us all another 1,400 hours of time. OK, bad idea. Congress, if forced to vote on what time of day it was, would split down party lines and they would need more time to argue about it.

Yes, forget that idea.

So, for now anyway, I guess it’s left up to me.

I can’t get up any earlier. I already get up at 4:00. I could go to bed later, but that means I would have to stay up way past 8:00! I could golf less and fish less, but that’s my job.

So, where am I going to find the time to paint the garage at the Hubbard Lake cottage and restain my docks before they go into the lake next week? Where am I going to find the time to till my garden? I have to powerwash my house, spread a load of rocks on my driveway, and replace some landscape timbers in the yard.

Or, maybe, I just need to face the facts.

I am getting old. Maybe time hasn’t changed, but I have. I move slower, and that makes time seem to move quicker. And, when I think about all that, I guess it’s OK, after all.

Mark Twain once said, “Don’t wait. The time will never be right.”

So, I will take his advice.

Don’t wait. It will get done, maybe not on “time”, but on “my time”. That way, I won’t feel the pressure. You can have your time, and I can have my time, although we all share the same time.

Does any of that make sense? I need more time to think about it.

But, right now, Neighbor Mark and I have leaves to rake.

Till next “time”.

Greg Awtry is the former publisher of the Scottsbluff (Neb.) Star-Herald and Nebraska’s York News-Times. He is now retired and living in Hubbard Lake. Greg can be contacted at gregawtry@awtry.com.