Full of sap

"The righteous flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the LORD; they flourish in the courts of our God. In old age they still produce fruit; they are always green and full of sap." — Psalm 92:12-14

Full of sap. That is the phrase I have been sitting with since Tuesday.

I came across it looking for something else, which is how I come across most things. And I read it and made a sound out loud in the kitchen, some noise between a laugh and an objection, because full of sap is not how I would have described this morning. This morning I got out of the chair in two motions. There is a first motion where I get to the front of the seat and a second motion where I stand up, and there used to be one motion, and I could not tell you the year it became two.

So: not full of sap. Full of something. Coffee, mostly.

But I have been carrying the phrase around since and it has been working on me the way a verse works on you when you do not put it down.

Here is what I notice. The psalm does not say the righteous stay young. It does not say they are spared. It says in old age they still produce fruit. Still. That word is doing everything. Still means despite. Still means the thing you would expect to have stopped has not stopped.

And it says they are planted. Not growing wild in a field somewhere on their own strength. Planted, in the house of the Lord, which means somebody put them there on purpose and they have roots in a particular soil and they did not choose the spot.

I have been in this town since 1949 with a gap of four years for college. I have been at Trinity since I was a girl. I taught in the same school system, off and on, for twenty-three years, and I have taught Sunday school in the same beige room for forty-nine. I did not plan any of that. There was no year I decided to be a woman who stayed. It happened the way things happen, one decision at a time, none of them looking like a life while I was making them.

Planted is a passive word. Something is done to the tree. The tree does not plant itself and does not choose the courtyard and does not decide to be green.

I am seventy-seven and I get up in two motions and there is fruit on me somewhere that I cannot see from where I stand, because you never can see your own. The children I taught are out there in their forties and fifties doing whatever they are doing. Some of that is fruit. I will not know which.

Full of sap. All right. I will take it on faith, the way I take most things.

Lord, you planted me. Do what you want with the fruit.