Apple butter

"This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."* — Psalm 118:24

The apple butter is on the stove.

I started it this morning at seven with a bushel of apples from the tree in the back yard and by nine the house smelled like cinnamon and brown sugar and the slow dark sweetness of apples cooking down, and Biscuit stationed himself in the kitchen doorway where the smell is strongest and has not moved since.

You have to stir it. That is the thing about apple butter that people who have not made it do not know. You cannot leave it. You cannot go upstairs and fold laundry and come back in twenty minutes. You stand at the stove and you stir it with a wooden spoon and you watch it thicken, and if you leave it alone it scorches and the whole batch is lost, and so you stay.

I have been standing here most of the morning. I stirred and listened to the radio and stirred and looked out the window at the back yard where the leaves are coming down in earnest now and stirred and thought about nothing in particular and then about Earl and then about nothing again, and that is how the morning went.

The psalmist says this is the day the Lord has made. He does not say it will be a remarkable day. He does not say it will be the day something important happens. He says the day itself is the thing, and I believe him, because today the day is a wooden spoon and a pot of apples and the smell of cinnamon and a dog in the doorway and the leaves outside the window, and it does not need to be anything else.

Lord, the apples are cooking and I am here stirring. That is the day you made.