Illustration: The Globe and Mail. Sources: Getty Images
Shelley Wood is a writer and journalist in Kelowna, B.C., and the author of the forthcoming novel, The Leap Year Gene.
On the last leap day, in 2020, I was in the midst of trying to fix time.
I’d travelled to France in the hopes of finishing a draft of my novel while still working at my full-time job. France was arbitrary. I lived in Kelowna, but even before the pandemic, I worked remotely on Eastern Time hours for a company in New York. I do my best writing in the morning, but squeezing that creativity in before my workday, which started at 6 a.m., was always a slog. My canny solution, in 2020, was to move to a time zone even further east. In France, on Central European Time, I could work all morning on my novel (incidentally featuring a leap-year baby with her own timeline troubles) then turn to my day job in the afternoon/evening to match up with East Coast hours. Knowing no one in town meant I wasn’t distracted by family or social engagements, leaving more unscheduled hours I could repurpose for my draft. Until COVID-19 hit in mid-March and I had to hightail it home, I was pretty pleased with the temporal rejiggering I’d used to shoehorn my day into my time.
The leap year exists because Roman Emperor Julius Caesar had pesky calendars problems of his own. His Julian calendar had 365 days, but the Earth’s orbit of the sun actually takes 365.2422. Vexed by the way important dates and celebrations kept sliding sideways into different seasons, in 45 BC he inserted an extra day, once every four years, into the second month of the year. Caesar’s fix was imperfect, however; each year remained 11 minutes too short. Within 128 years, a whole day was lost.
Pope Gregory XIII, 1,600 years later, must have been the kind of guy who hates to lose an entire day with nothing to show for it. His subtle edit retained the leap year once every four years, but cancels three leap days every 400 years, on the centennial. As a result, the year 2000 was a leap year, but 1900, 1800, and 1700 were not. Now, our Gregorian calendar slips its moorings imperceptibly, taking 3,300 years to lose a single day.
If all of that sounds confusing, it gets even more so when you layer in the mythology that cultures have ascribed to what is technically referred to as a “bissextile” year. The most well-known, popularized by the 2010 movie Leap Year starring Amy Adams, hails from Ireland and specifies Feb. 29 as the sole day that a woman can upend patriarchal convention and ask a man to marry her. When that tradition spread further afield, a man who refused a proposal could be fined for turning her down. In Finland, a man spurning betrothal had to gift his suitress enough fabric to fashion a skirt. In Denmark, the compensation was set at 12 pairs of gloves, presumably to help the jilted hide her lack of an engagement ring but also, helpfully, keeping her hands warm to atone for his cold feet.
Other cultures attach bad luck to the leap year. A Scottish adage declares the leap year to be dire for sheep farming, while in Greece, wedding planners face challenges on a four-year cycle, because marriages taking place in a leap year are believed to be doomed to end in divorce. In Taiwan, folklore holds that elderly parents are more likely to die in a leap year; daughters are encouraged to return home for a visit bearing pig trotter noodles.
To me, all of these superstitions speak to our human need to attach order and meaning to the gallop of our days, and understand those rare moments when time’s cadence is disrupted. The leap year is our quadrennial reminder that our perceptions of time can never square neatly with our timetables.
Take, for example, the way time accelerates as we age. For children, summer vacations often seem to stretch golden and endless, but as adults, we’re regularly shocked by Facebook “memory” notifications for eight-year-old vacations.
Philosophers have attributed this phenomenon to “log-time” – the interval between birthdays for a five-year-old represents an enormous proportion of their time on Earth, but for their grandparents, it’s a forgettable fraction of their long lives. Physicists offer the theory of slower processing speeds in the human brain, with age: Older adults view far fewer images in a single instant than do toddlers and children, giving the impression that time itself is gathering speed. Ask the psychologists and they’ll wax on about the interaction of emotion and memory with perceived time, placing special importance on attention, expectation and context.
This last explanation resonates with me, because this interval between leap years feels both too long and too short. I blame COVID. Four years ago, when our worlds shrunk and our base emotions were so keenly felt – fear, dread, anxiety, but also gratitude – days and weeks seemed to slow to an aimless dawdle. Time theorists, not surprisingly, have studied “COVID time,” too. “Different emotional states,” wrote the University of Aberdeen psychologists Daria Pawlak and Arash Sahraie in 2023, “affect the way we perceive the passing of time. Objectively time passes at a constant linear rate. Subjectively, our experience of time is influenced by the activities that we perform and the emotions that we experience.” During COVID, they hypothesized, “it is likely that changed routines and uncertainty about the future contributed to our distorted experience of the passage of time.”
Deprived of office commutes, kids’ sports, weekend getaways and all the other temporal cues we typically use to orient ourselves, time shrugged out of calendar’s bridle. For the first time since I was a kid (and one protracted period of unemployment), I could wake up and wonder what day it was. Only when virtual versions of everything I used to do swept in to eat up my hours did the days speed up again – thanks a bunch, Zoom. Novel-wise, after several months of blissful productivity, I didn’t finish the darn thing for another three years.
But if I learned anything from COVID, it’s that the tizzy of daily life becomes its metronome. All that whack-a-mole scheduling that forces me to prioritize and rationalize – trade a dog walk for grocery shopping, insert a coffee date by deleting the gym, move halfway around the world just to scrape together enough hours to write – these things don’t just exhaust my time: they pace it. Subtract some, pay more attention to others and I can’t stall time, but I can hold more of its moments in my mind.
An extra day in February? That feels neither auspicious nor unlucky, not unless I let my calendar drift. A leap day loses its specialness if I schedule it full of tasks and meet-ups. Busyness, I’ve learned, is not what gives texture to the fabric of my days, it’s the gaps in the weave. I don’t need enough of this fabric to fashion a skirt: just enough hollow hours to get lost in, for a day. And have nothing, in the end, to show for it.