What To Leave In, What To Leave Out

 

Matthew 6:25&26

Do Not Worry

25 “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?

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🎕

A Day 

Silence.

The sky is lightening in the east.  Faint light,  just touching the things in the room, revealing old worn upholstered furniture.  A lot of things are showing wear.

A June day, in the year 2030.  Birdsong starting up now.  Heat rising.  I can feel it in the house now. Morning has a sound.  All soft animal and bird sounds.  A dog barks at some distance.  No freeway roar.

Thankful to the Almighty, we still have water.  The PNW Section Authority probably doesn’t even know it.  They don’t know everything, though they think they do.  A lot depends on who says what to whom.

I step quietly across the floor, leaving him sleeping, back in the bedroom, entering my kitchen.  I begin building a fire.  Years ago we brought the old woodstove back into the house and re-installed it.  A good move, considering recent history.  The electric stove, a catch-all, sits cold. There has been no electrical service for five years now.  We didn’t know how long it would be this way, now we don’t expect to see it again.

It is a continual job finding fuel.  This morning I have some dead fir twigs and some of the larger branches cut into one foot pieces.  It will make a small hot fire. 

I fill my kettle at the kitchen faucet, glancing out of the window.  Nothing is moving.  I take it to the stove and set it there.  We thought it was a bit of a game years ago when they said to start storing food and supplies, but we did it dutifully.  We played that game in a big way.  One of my purchases was a five gallon bucket of oatmeal.  It’s amazing how long a five gallon bucket of oatmeal can last.  Sometimes it seems like something odd is going on there. 

So, this morning, it’s oatmeal.  Plain, but with salt.  We haven’t had butter, sugar, or milk in a while. I do have tea.  Coffee is a dream from a different time.

My husband, rangy, sleepy, and grey, arrives to sit at the table.  “Good morning, baby” I say.  I would think he looked sad, but for his blue-eyed smile.  With water boiling now, I can make a big pot of plain black Lipton’s tea.  We bought several boxes of that too.

***

Getting the news is chancy.  It’s mostly word of mouth.  Like peasants in the old world, we take it as it comes around here.  Whenever we see a neighbor, we trade what we have heard.  It spreads through the population that way.  But, our lives are governed by the time of year now, and the weather.  We are blessed by living outside of Milltown.  Occasionally a person must go into town.  It’s strange to see it so quiet.  Everything is overgrown.  Bushes, grass, grass grows in rows down the middle of the streets. The only cars we see are driven by PNW Section Auth. bigwigs, I must assume.  The few people who live in town do not have our advantages.  We have an acre.  A lot can be done with an acre.

Henry does the outside work, gardening and watching out for our hens. We have some small trees that he is gradually harvesting for fire.

I never did get rid of the mountain of fabric and yarn I had collected over the years.  That was called hoarding ten years ago, and considered a mental disease.

This morning Marjory Sullivan came by to pick up a sweater for her son.  “Hey, Marjory, what do you think?”, I say displaying a navy blue pullover.  It took me two weeks to knit it. “Oh, so nice Linda!  I love it!” Her boy won’t need it for several months.  Folding it carefully, she finally puts it into her backpack and starts back down the road, heading east and over the river. It is a two mile walk to her place.

Silence again.  I don’t really have a pet, only chickens.  If I go out behind the house, I can hear them talking chicken talk.  It is a quiet world.

Marjory brought smoked sausage for the sweater.  They live on a bigger place further out.  She raises three pigs per year usually.  I hate to think about that.

“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” This is truth.

Henry and I have sausage with some salad greens from his garden and some boiled little potatoes for our dinner.

This day ends as quietly as it began.  A sunset. A deepening blue sky, then stars.