the hen's march

The days are growing longer by wee increments, specifically, goes the folklore, by a hen's tread: um hænufet. Apparently the first tread of this celestial hen is 9 seconds in Reykjavík, the next 27 seconds, and the next 44 seconds.

Bless the University Almanac for putting up a page that shows exactly what the length of a hen's tread is from one short day to the next both in Reykjavík and up in Akureyri. I, for one, would not otherwise have a sense of this measure, being a town-dweller and unused to hens. Most of the local fowl are clustered in the town end of the pond, sqwonking and slurping up quantities of soggy bread, and hens do not number among them. The dominant species is the gray goose. Their steps are clearly visible in the snow and the spacial distance from one to the next easily measurable by anyone with decent boots and a ruler. Or, if the temporal span of a goose-tread were of interest, one could take a stopwatch along and time the interval of their lazy waddle from one pink foot to the other. However, to my knowledge the tread of geese does not correspond to any other particular distance in time or space.

Not unless we count intellectual space, in which the span between the one goose foot and the next is the space of attribution. Quotation marks are goose feet, gæsalappir, and quotations appear within them, innan gæsalappa. As a result, the geese on the snow-covered Tjörn remind me of gray dons and docents, lost in thought, methodically marking on the white page the borders between their own scattered thoughts and those of prior scholars.