You can't get back in an hour what you've thrown away for a day.

From Alfred’s journal

Switch spent most of the morning digging for a cache he buried in October, and by noon he had turned up half the bed under the hedge and found nothing but a bottle cap. He wanted me to help him remember where he had stood when he buried it. I told him I had been asleep in a different tree. For years I thought the trouble with wasting a day was the day; now I think it is that you cannot get back in an hour what you have thrown away for a day, and the hour knows it, which is why it panics. He dug until the light went orange and the dirt was flying behind him in a thin brown spray. What I keep turning over is that he was not unhappy out there. The digging was good. It was only the finding that had gone wrong.