The porch after supper

"Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise." — Deuteronomy 6:6-7

I was on the back porch this evening watching the light go and I thought about my mother, the way she used to sit on the porch after supper in the summer. She had a metal chair, the kind with the scalloped back that left a pattern on your skin if you leaned against it too long, and she sat in it every evening from May to September with a bowl in her lap, shelling butter beans or snapping green beans or shucking corn, whatever the garden had given her that week.

She did not talk much during the shelling. That was the thing about my mother in the evenings. During the day she was a talker, a woman with opinions about everything and the energy to share them, but in the evenings after supper she went quiet, and the quiet was not tired. It was a different kind of my mother. She was listening to the evening the way a person listens to music, not with her mind but with whatever part of a person the evening speaks to.

I sat beside her on the porch steps. I was small enough that the steps were the right height. I did not help with the shelling because I was too slow and she did not have patience for slow when it came to beans, but I sat there, and she let me sit there, and the evening came down around both of us and neither of us said anything about it.

My father would be inside listening to the radio. I could hear it through the screen door, the sound of somebody talking about something that had nothing to do with the porch or the beans or the evening. He came out sometimes and stood in the doorway and watched my mother shell beans, and he did not say anything either, and I think now that those evenings were a kind of prayer none of us would have called prayer.

The light this evening is the same light. The valley holds it the same way. I do not have butter beans to shell and there is nobody on the steps beside me, but the porch is the same porch the evening speaks to, and I am listening the way my mother listened, which is with the part of me that does not need words.

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