Down the rabbit hole

By Christine Tailer
HCP columnist

I often find myself getting sidetracked. I might be reading a book and find a word with which I'm not familiar. The most recent such word was widdershins. 

I put down Robert Louis Stevenson's 1896 book "Fables," and turned to the internet to look it up. I found that widdershins means counterclockwise. 

Stevenson had used it to describe an old woman dancing on a beach and seagulls circling in the sky over her head. I promised myself to add it to my vocabulary. Greg would become my unwitting audience.

I just needed to find the right circumstance. I thought that would not be difficult, seeing as we share our home with Greg's mechanical clock collection. 

The situation soon arose. One of our four cuckoo clocks was running about 15 minutes fast. I needed to turn the minute hand counterclockwise to the correct time, but I knew that there was more to this maneuver than simply pushing the hand back to the correct time.

Greg has taught me that there is no problem when turning the hands on a mechanical clock forward, or clockwise, but setting the time back on a mechanical clock, can only be done as long as one does not pass a time when the clock cuckoos or chimes. Passing a cuckoo or chime time would break the chime mechanism.

I stood before the little fast-running cuckoo and asked Greg, who was seated in his comfortable chair across the room, if I could turn the clock's minute hand widdershins as long as I did not pass the hour. 

He looked at me quizzically, looked at the clock, and asked, "Now what did you say?" 

I smiled and explained how I had once again fallen down the rabbit hole as I was lead from a wonderful fable about the cycle of life, to my use of the word widdershins.

But alas, this explanation to my dear husband, and my use of the idiom "down the rabbit hole" led me to take a turn down another tunnel in my current rabbit burrow. How, I wondered, did the expression "down the rabbit hole" come to be?

I looked again to the internet, and much to my surprise I learned that the expression was derived from Lewis Carroll's "Adventures of Alice in Wonderland," first published in 1865. In a similar fashion as dear Alice, when we fall down a rabbit hole, we become thoroughly involved in something unexpected, and often lose track of time as we follow one strange turn after another.

And so it was that Robert Louis Stevenson, in 1896, led me farther back in time to Lewis Carroll in 1865, so that when I jumped forward to 2025, I could set our fast little cuckoo back to its correct time.

Later that day, Greg and I decided to head out to the grocery store. We pushed our chosen cart through the front door and proceeded to navigate our way, circling widdershins, as we always have, through the store. Shopping in our usual widdershins fashion, however, brought a smile to my face as it never had before.

A few afterthoughts:

- I usually stir the sugar in my coffee, swirling the spoon widdershins.

- Our daily animal chores always start with the goats, and end at the pasture, widdershins once more.

- And then, when we visit antique malls, we first make a widdershins stroll around the perimeter, after which we turn to tackle the internal aisles.

So many ways to enjoy this word, widdershins!

Christine Tailer is an attorney and former city dweller who moved several years ago, with her husband, Greg, to an off-grid farm in Ohio south-central Ohio. Visit them on the web at straightcreekvalleyfarm.com.