Leap Day

  Greetings everyone on this Leap year day. Funny thing, leap year an extra day a day where in some cultures convention may be allowed  to slip as if being granted an extra day one is given a free pass, a get out of jail free card or permission to upset the order of things a bit because after all its an extra day. Somehow being  extra it doesn't have to answer to the rest of the year, sort of the Vegas vacation of days. For example in my youth it was the one day that it was ok for a girl to ask a boy out, on a date or to go steady or whatever it was called at the time. Even then in the early 1970's the tradition was probably a carry over from years past because it was after all the era of sexual liberation when most conventions were being challenged. Not so much in a small town junior high school in western Massachusettes where the Womens movement hadn't quite taken hold. You would be surprised at how well insulated some of those small towns had kept themselves from the surrounding influences and perceived decadence  of the all womens Liberal arts colleges like Smith or Mount Holyoke. Anyway I was far too awkward and shy to consider asking any boy out even if it were to be announced that the last day of life as we know it was upon us. I would have spent the end of times alone in my room with my cat listening to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or maybe some Led Zepplin if I was feeling particularly sassy.  Now decades later I still feel there should be a magical quality of some sort attached to an extra day. Even if the day is merely a silly attempt to reconcile a calendar that stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the phases of the moon as a logical guide for measuring time. And maybe therin lies the origin of the suspension of societal gender norms that dictated the absurd rule that the initiation of a  relationship should be an exclusively male priveledge.  Seems a petty consolation, one day every four years, for the loss of a female centered measurement of the cycles amd passages of time.    2010-2012 Nanakoosa’s Place, authored by Jennifer Hazard