Sunday Evening

"But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, 'You are my God.' My times are in your hand." — Psalm 31:14-15

It is Sunday evening and October is here.

I have been living with September people all week. Monday I sat in the kitchen after the prayer list and did not get up, and that has been happening more lately — a minute that is not asking for anything and not waiting for anything, just sitting. Tuesday there was a bird at the feeder I had never seen, brown and yellow with a stripe over the eye, and it stayed three minutes and left and I cannot stop thinking about it. I am going to need a field guide, which Earl would have found very funny, since I sat next to a field guide for forty-five years and never opened him.

Wednesday night my brother Ray called and he had found a photograph of our mother's kitchen in a box in his back bedroom, and I stood in my kitchen looking at a picture of her kitchen and they were not the same kitchen and they were exactly the same kitchen.

Thursday I wrote Earl a letter I will not send, because his birthday is in two weeks and October always does this to me — it arrives and it is beautiful and it does not have him in it, and I have to keep going into it anyway.

Friday I sat with the word abide until it stopped being a church word and started being a vine word. Saturday the frost did not come and the tomatoes are still alive under the old sheets and I stood in the yard at first light and the prayer was thank you.

And this morning there were eight children in the circle and Lily told me the first thing the Samaritan did, and she was right, and I taught the ditch for twenty minutes, and Caleb was there watching, and nobody needed to be told to listen.

My times are in your hand. I believe that the way I believe the sun will come up — not because I have been persuaded but because it keeps happening. October is here and it is the month of Earl's birthday and it is the month of the first frost and it is the month the valley turns, and I am in it, and I am still here, and the frost did not come last night and the boy was in the chair this morning and there is a bird I cannot name.

That is plenty.

Until next Sunday.