Sunday Evening

"The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage." — Psalm 16:6

It is Sunday evening and the house is quiet and the light outside is going gold the way it does in June when the day takes its time leaving. I am in the chair by the lamp but I have not turned the lamp on yet. There is enough light to write by, and I am going to use it until it is gone.

The week was a good one. Hannah's birthday was Tuesday and we talked for longer than usual, which I am not going to examine too closely because examining good things is the fastest way to make them stop. The strawberry jam is on the shelf, six jars, and the lids all sealed. The garden is growing. The mornings have turned warm.

Tomorrow is the anniversary. Fifty-two years since Earl and I stood in the church and said what we said and meant every word of it without knowing what the words would cost or what they would give. I do not dread the day. I used to, in the first years after. Now it is more like visiting a room in a house I still live in. The room is there. I go in. I sit for a while. I come back out.

I will put flowers on the table tomorrow, the way I did when he was here. Not for him. He is not here to see them. For me, because the table looks right with flowers on it on June the eighth, and some things you keep doing not because they still serve their original purpose but because the doing of them is the purpose now.

The creek is going. The fan is on. Monday tomorrow, and the laundry, and the week ahead, and the anniversary inside it like a stone in a pocket, smooth from carrying.

Lord, hold the morning.

Goodnight.