Page 64 - Nuts to You - The Nutcracker Retold

Almost every moment of every day was regimented by the clock, which was quite hard for a girl who loved to read and loved to tinker – for these things take time and make you lose track of time.
So, before she lost him due to a broken clock, Clara’s growing fondness for Franz was both ironic – because he was a clockmaker’s apprentice, which meant he and Drosselmeir were the ones who kept the myriad (that means bunches and bunches) of clocks running and ruling Clara’s life – and natural, because they shared a love of disassembling one thing or another, be it a music box, or a kaleidoscope, or Clara’s favorite “take-apart-and-end-up- with-more-pieces” than when you started on them clocks! She was perpetually trying to stop time.
Now, I don’t know if she did this on purpose.
Oh, let’s be honest – Clara was a regular clock assassin. No clock was safe if she could figure out how to open the back and get to its innards. Those who knew her – which did not include her parents – wondered if she was trying to find time for her reading, or create reasons for visits from Drosselmeir, and, more importantly, Franz.
Drosselmeir had sympathized with Clara and never let on that there was a time-saboteur in the Stahlbaum household, taking all the blame on himself when he was accused of shoddy workmanship.
Clara’s mother thought Drosselmeir made extremely inferior timepieces.
And if there had been another clockmaker in town, or if the roads to their hamlet had been any less steep, Mother Stahlbaum would have imported from Switzerland the giant
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