Still Bringing Forth

The jar is a quart jar and it is warm from the water bath, and Ida is holding it against her apron with a cloth while she gets the ring started, and her hands are doing it about half as fast as they used to.

The girl is watching. Fifteen, maybe, elbows on the counter, hair pushed back with the back of a wrist because her fingers are sticky. She has been in this kitchen since ten this morning because her mother had somewhere to be, and she came in bored and she is not bored now.

"You wipe the rim," Ida says. "Every time. Even when you think you did not spill any. Especially then."

She wipes the rim with a clean cloth, and the girl watches the cloth go round.

"Now the lid, flat, do not slide it on. Then the ring, and finger tight is tight. If you crank it down like a lug nut the air cannot get out and it will not seal, and you will be standing here in the morning wondering why."

Her thumb and forefinger turn the ring, and the ring goes on crooked the first time because her hands are not what they were, and she takes it off and does it again without saying anything about it, and the second time it goes on straight.

She has done this since she was eight years old at her grandmother's elbow. There are years she put up four hundred jars between August and the first frost, alone, with a baby on her hip. She could have told you the pressure and the minutes for every vegetable that grows in this county without stopping to think.

Now it takes her most of an afternoon to do a dozen, and she has to sit down twice, and the shelf in the cellar is not what it used to be, and about a year and a half ago Ida quietly closed something in herself and did not tell anybody she had done it.

She would not put it in words this plain, but the words are these: I was useful, and then my strength went, and useful was the thing I was.

So she stopped. Not from the kitchen. She still cooks. She stopped from the other thing, the thing she used to be to this whole road: the one who came when the freezer failed, who took the class at the extension office, who could tell a woman over the telephone at eleven at night what to do about a batch that was not setting. She let all of that go without a word. Nobody noticed she had, which she notices.

And here she is in her own kitchen with a girl's elbows on her counter, giving away forty years of it a sentence at a time, and it has not once occurred to her that anything is happening.

You are the one at the counter. I do not know what your strength was or what it is now, and I am not going to guess, and I am not here to tell you that you can still do what you used to do, because that is not honest and you would know it inside a sentence. What I want to do is stand at your elbow for a minute and look at where the fruit actually is, because I do not think you are looking in the right part of the kitchen.

Fruit Is What a Planted Thing Does

Let me name the weight first, and I will name it the way you would say it if you said it, which you do not.

It is not that things are harder. Everybody knows things get harder. It is the conclusion you drew from it, quietly, in a kitchen, with nobody there: that what people had from you was your capacity, so when the capacity went, the person who was any use went with it. That is a heavy sentence to have signed alone and never read to anybody, and it has kept you off the telephone for a year and a half.

Now here is what the Word says about a life at exactly your stage of it.

The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing:Psalm 92:12-14

Read where the fruit comes from in that. Not from effort. Not from output. From being planted. A tree does not bear because it has decided to try harder this year, and it does not stop bearing because its growing went slow. It bears because of where it stands and whose ground it is in. You are planted in the house of the Lord, and bearing is what a planted thing does, not a thing you have to get your strength back to qualify for. That is not my encouragement to hand out. It is God's, written down in Psalm 92, and the same Spirit who put it there is standing in the kitchen where the jars are.

And notice the word the psalm insists on. Still. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age. It is written into the verse as an argument against the exact sentence you signed alone: the psalm knows what a person concludes when the strength goes, and it says still, on purpose, before anybody thought to ask. You have a season that God has not closed, and He did not consult your grip when He decided that. His word carries no clause that retires a planted tree, and His Spirit is not keeping a second and stricter list of who counts as useful.

Your Hands Got Slower and Your Reach Got Longer

Now the second thing, and it is the one I would drive out here to say to you in person.

Look again at what happened at that counter this afternoon, because it has been counted as nothing.

You sealed a dozen jars. Slowly. That is the part you saw, and by that arithmetic it was a poor day next to a day in 1980 when you did forty before noon.

But there is a girl in the room, and the girl now knows to wipe a rim even when she thinks she did not spill, and knows what finger tight means, and knows that a ring going on crooked is not a catastrophe, and will know those things when she is seventy. That is not a dozen jars. That is every jar she puts up for the rest of her life, and every jar of everyone she ever shows, and you did it in an afternoon with hands that shook.

That is the arithmetic Scripture actually uses.

And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.2 Timothy 2:2

Count the generations in that one sentence. Paul, Timothy, faithful people, others also. Four, in a single breath, and the man writing it was in a cell and could not travel a mile. His output was nearly nothing that year. His reach was the next three hundred years. You were given something to hand on, and handing it on is not what a person does when they can no longer do the real work, it is the real work. Hear where I get it from rather than taking it off me: 2 Timothy 2:2 puts the whole chain in writing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an afternoon at a counter into a link in it.

I want to be careful here and say what I am not saying. This is not a new job you now have to take on, and I am not handing you a quota of young people to raise up. Titus 2 speaks of older women as teachers of good things, and it describes a life, not an assignment with a target on it. Fruit is not something you owe anybody. If you cannot name a purpose yet, nothing has been wasted and nobody is behind. You are already bearing, before you have named it, because the fruit belongs to the planting and the planting was His idea. Psalm 92 puts it that way in writing, and the Spirit who inspired it is the one making it true in a cellar with fewer jars on the shelf.

One thing plainly, late and quiet, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If closing that door in yourself has gone somewhere darker, if the thought has come that the road would do just as well without you on it, tell one human being today, out loud, and if there is any danger at all, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. That is one more ordinary thing a free woman does, and there is no shame anywhere near it.