We sit with our supper plates in front of the tv. Old folks with comfortable routines. Our evenings are chilly already, these recliners soft and warm. A blanket covers my legs, and a padded lap desk. My Daddy had salt and pepper shakers on the side table next to his chair when it was just the two of them after the five of us kids were gone. We’d sit around their oak table for Tuesday night dinners out at the ranch, Live Oak trees rustling outside the windows, but those salt and pepper shakers told me they had their cozy suppers in their chairs when there was no company. I remember thinking that I would never do that, as if it were an embarrassment to be old.

It’s hard to watch all the suffering in our world over a plate of warm supper. I had to turn the evening news off last night. My body has lost its hardiness, my heart its ability to look away. An embarrassment of riches, these old bodies, our warm cabin, our full plates in our laps, our children and grandchildren tucked safe in their homes.

And we are given another year. Fall comes round again with its brilliant September and October. School starts, signaling the real new year for these old teachers, another opportunity for new beginnings. The Norway Maple turns gold, the fire bush burns red, pumpkins sit on the stone wall and the pear trees up in the orchard become works of art as their leaves turn yellow around the little brown and yellow fruit.

We haven’t picked those pears yet. A few drop to the damp ground below and we bring them into the house to see how they’ll ripen. We’re still waiting for that first snap of frost, heeding Aunt Anna Lou’s instructions. “They say to wait for that first frost if you want the sugar content to be right.” Two years ago we picked them early. They didn’t really ripen, were rubbery instead of soft, and didn’t last in the cellar until Christmas as they usually do when we layer them in shallow boxes with paper. And so we wait. Another reminder that living here requires a shaping of our lives to the place, rather than the other way around. And that means marking the coming and going of each season, over and over, year after year, gobsmacked anew at each turning, repeating myself whether anyone else is interested or not . . . a witness testifying to His goodness.  

Another evening comes. I’ve waited too long to start supper. I light the candle in the kitchen window, chop and stir. Let my hands sort my thoughts, focus my heart.

I think of Buechner’s words about the night he really saw the darkness of the world from his train window returning home from a trip. “I’d seen it all before and will doubtless see it all again, but walking from my train to the Port Authority Bus Terminal . . . I saw it almost as if for the first time . . . I found myself suddenly so scared stiff by what I saw that if I’d known a place to hide, I would have gone and hidden there. And what scared me most was not just the brutality and ugliness of it all but how vulnerable I was to the brutality and ugliness . . . The world and all of us in it are half in love with our own destruction . . . hungry to devour each other.”

It was late and dark when I got there . . . but there were lights on in the house. My wife and daughter were there. They had waited supper for me. There was a fire in the woodstove, and the cat was asleep on his back in front of it, one paw in the air. There are problems at home for all of us—problems as dark in their way as the dark streets of any city—but they were nowhere to be seen just then. There was nothing there just then except stillness, light, peace, and the love that had brought me back again and that I found waiting for me when I got there . . . Warmth. Light. Peace. Stillness. Love. That was what I felt. And as I entered that room where they were present, it seemed to me that wherever these things are found in the world, they should not be a cause for guilt but treasured, nurtured, sheltered from the darkness that threatens them.
—from Faith, A Room Called Remember—Frederick Buechner 

Again, I remind myself that all of this matters. The tired cooking. The shaping myself to our new normal, rather than the other way around. Remembering that I am the memory for someone of the one I carry . . . the memory of home.