This week I sent my friend Marie a birthday message. I am so grateful for the years that we worked together, and for the many lessons she taught me about never giving up on people. We don’t see each other often any more, yet we remember each other by sending postcards from our travels, holiday greetings, notes of sympathy and birthday wishes.
She responded to my birthday message and wrote, “I am in the middle of redoing my house … Now walls and woodwork have been painted and though I’m delighted with the changes, I have much to sort out and am ready to have the house back to myself. So much for progress. I love the ‘Lily Lavender’ color of my living room. Maybe I’ll finally get through the boxes from my folks’ house.”
When she wrote that the oxymoron “now then” had tickled her into laughter, it set me to wondering.
Now the apples, squashes, pumpkins, cabbages piled high in farm stands signal that the harvest is in. The work of planting, fertilizing, weeding and picking is ending for another year. There are fewer flowers in bloom from the seeds planting last spring in gardens. I have shifted my potted perennials indoors again as the nights are becoming chilly. Now then.
“To everything there is a season” from the Book of Ecclesiastes, 3:1-8, in the Jewish Bible, was a reading in the funeral service I attended last week. The rite of passage honored the 82 years of a woman’s life. Her children, in-laws, nieces, nephews, grandchildren and friends came to remember and observe the harvest of that life. It was a time for honoring the differences that one life had made in the lives of so many others. It was a time to notice that this woman’s grandchildren are now adults themselves and some of them will undoubtedly have children and grandchildren of their own some day. Now then.
As the fruits from the season before are spread out, I observe the harvest today and turn towards setting in provisions for the season ahead. Today I will cook applesauce from the apples picked off the trees yesterday. I will freeze most of that applesauce to use this winter. Now then.
My Turn 