Before the children

"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other." — Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

There was a time before the children when it was just the two of us and neither of us knew what we were doing.

We had been married less than a year. We lived on the other side of town in a place that was not really an apartment and not really a house, a set of rooms above a feed store that smelled like grain and oil and someone else's life. Earl was working for a farmer outside of town, learning what he did not know yet, which was most of it, and I was finishing my first year of teaching and coming home tired in a way I had not been tired before, the kind of tired that comes from being responsible for other people's children all day and then walking into a kitchen where nobody needs you and the quiet is so sudden it sounds loud.

He cooked, those first months. I had not expected that. He was not a good cook, and he did not pretend to be, but he had the food on the table when I walked in and he had set the table, and the table was a card table and the plates did not match and there was always too much salt in whatever he had made, but he had done it. He stood by the stove with a dish towel over his shoulder like he had seen someone do it that way and decided that was how it was done.

I do not know why I am thinking about this. It is a Monday morning in June and I have been sitting at this table with my coffee and the house is quiet the way the house is quiet now, which is a different quiet from the quiet above the feed store. That quiet was waiting for something to start. This quiet is what is left after everything has happened.

He would not have known, standing at that stove with too much salt in the beans, that he would become the man he became. That is the thing about the beginning of a marriage. You are making promises about a life you cannot imagine yet, and the keeping of them is going to look nothing like you thought, and you keep them anyway or you do not and either way the years are going to come.

Forty-five years he stood at that stove, at other stoves, at this stove. The salt got better. The kitchen got bigger. The children came and filled it and then left and the quiet came back, and now the quiet is permanent and the table is mine alone and I remember the man who put too much salt in the beans and set the card table with plates that did not match and was proud of himself for it.

I loved that man. I love him still. They are not the same love, but they are the same man.

Lord, thank you for the man at the stove.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.