devotional

The top shelf

Ruby Hayes

— 2 min read
Share
Watercolor of a wooden shelf lined with sealed mason jars of golden peach preserves and red tomato sauce, above a painted cabinet in warm window light.

"Is wisdom with the aged, and understanding in length of days?" — Job 12:12

The jar was on the top shelf and I reached for it and my shoulder told me something I did not ask it to say.

It was the peach preserves, the last jar from the batch I put up two weeks ago. I have kept things on that shelf for forty-seven years. The shelf has not moved. The jars have not changed. What has changed is the distance between my hand and the shelf, which is not a distance measured in inches but in years, and the years have an opinion about reaching that they did not used to have.

I got the jar down. It was not difficult. It was not painful. It was just slower than it once was, and the slowness carried with it a small awareness that I have been noticing more often this summer. The body keeps its own calendar. The body does not consult the mind about what it remembers.

I made toast and I opened the jar and the preserves were good. They tasted the way August peaches are supposed to taste when you cook them down with sugar and a little lemon and seal them while they are still hot. My mother's recipe. The taste has not changed. The reaching has.

I sat at the table and I thought about what it means to have done something for a long time. Not the big things. Not the decades of marriage or the years of teaching or the raising of three children. The small things. Reaching for a jar. Walking to the mailbox. Kneeling in the garden and standing up again. These are the things that measure time in a body, and the measurements are honest in a way that the mirror is not. The mirror shows me a woman who looks the way she has looked for years. The shoulder shows me a woman who has been reaching for that shelf since 1979 and whose reaching has changed.

I do not mind this. That is the truth of it. I do not mind the slowness or the awareness or the small conversation between the body and the morning. What I mind, if I am honest, is that the awareness is new. There was a time when I reached for the shelf and the reaching was invisible. I did not notice it because there was nothing to notice. Now I notice it, and the noticing is the thing that has changed more than the reaching.

I washed the plate and put it away and I reached for the cabinet door and closed it and my shoulder said nothing at all.

Lord, the days are long and the years are short and I am grateful for both.