What time is it, Mister Wolf?

I've been thinking about time this morning (seeing as how I don't have any) and how stories are situated in time.

One of my favourite sentences is from Richard Adams' Watership Down:

The primroses were over.

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Four words situate the novel in time, without ever telling us an exact date.

Other authors do use dates, for example Tolkien in Lord of the Rings:

That very month was September, and as fine as you could ask.

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(Did you know that today is Frodo's birthday? (Bilbo's, too.))

In The Hobbit, he's a little more vague at the beginning:

By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there ws less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast...

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So...

Enough of the prologue. Here's the challenge:

Write a sentence or a paragraph that situates your story or novel in time. Be as precise or as picturesque as you like. For extra credit, try a style that's different than your usual one.

The tears were still trying to wash away the ashes on the streets of New York

The potato crop failed that year, not just in our field but in the next field, and the next, and all the rest of the land. Yet, what could a man grow but potatoes?

(Does the challenge mean placing a story in time and not in space?)

reph,

It doesn't matter whether you place your story in space or not in this short excerpt...

I'd just like to challenge folks to try for time in this exercise. (We'll do place next...)

Junius wasn't too drunk to know he was done for as soon as he spilled half a cup of wine down the front of the emperor's toga.

This shortest day was covered by silence, followed by the longest night filled with screams.

"Mom, are we having eggs and hash browns?"

It took us less than ten minutes to fill our bushel basket with tart McIntosh apples.

The first backaching day of blueberry harvest always seems like the hottest day of the year, and sometimes it really is.

It was the first of November.

On May 23, 2004, I died.

Little Johnny carefully placed the basket of flowers on the front step before ringing the bell and running away to stand next to the ribboned pole on the green.

The little baby was born in a manger.

It was my kind of bar. The drinks were cheap, the lights were low, and nobody wore an "I Like Ike" button.

BTW, Yesh, what a great idea.

The women were naked, dancing around us in an ecstatic trance when Jimmy's "Star Spangled Banner" startled us. We screamed.

"Stop with that heroic ancestor stuff, Jim! I'm sick of it! You think you married down, just because your great-great-grandfather fought in the Vee-et Something War! Let me tell you, that doesn't make your family any better than mine!"

"Well, he did, Sheila. And they didn't have robotic infantry then."

It was just after all the leaves fell. That curious time in Ohio, when it is not quite bitter cold, not quite time for snow, but everything is already dead. It is a time that looks bleaker than the worst imagined armageddon.

he looked down at the blossoming fields. there should be more flowers. where was spring?

The last leaf fell.

As we watched that great shining ball drop in Times Square....

Sentence

It was the only night of the year when real zombies, like Rick, could walk down the street without eliciting screams.

Re: Sentence

As Sarah followed the marked path to the outhouse, a gust of wind made the ice-coated branches of nearby trees chime like tiny glass bells in a fairy tale.

When my elephant began running to higher ground, I hung on and wondered why he was acting so strangely.

The last cherry blossom had just withered when Mrs. Kawasaki passed away.