Light Keeper

Snow falls, and I take out bread pans, and think of Mrs. Marjorie and her lifestory....
Mrs. Marjorie gave my Mama her bread pans when she went to the nursing home, 16 years after they had first sent her home to die.
And when we married, Mama gave the bread pans to me. Our bread comes out of Mrs. Marjorie's loaf pans.
And her life feeds mine daily: Joy warmed her.

:::

I eat bread and think of her, she who lived in a patch of light amidst the dark whispers of pines.

I am twelve again, and up through the arching tunnel of old pine limbs, I pedal up the grassy median of her gravel lane. A shaft of sunlight outlines the hunch of her mountainous back there on edge of crumbling porch.

Mrs. Marjorie Knight, the painful curvature of her aged silhouette, hangs over a black dog pooled at her feet. One frail arm rises to wave me up through pressing shadows. Tippy’s midnight tail, tip baptized white, thumps my welcome.

A craggy pine trunk stand as hitching post for fenderless bike. I smile shyly, step pass Mrs. Marjorie holding open a ripped screen door, and into her dim kitchen. Pine branches shift and scratch against a window pane. The aroma of bread baking mingles with the faint scent of yellowed photographs and musty papers.

Mrs. Marjorie shuffles past me with that quiet chuckle that punctuates her words: “Well, if you care to take a seat, girl, we could butter up a slice of bread together. And a glass of milk, too?”

Her ebony cat-eye glasses with the rhinestones in the corners slip down her nose. Is it the rolling curve of her spine, her endless waves of laughter, that do that?

She laughs again and slips them back in place.

I sit down on a high back chair. Dimly lit corners, heavy doors cracked open to unknown rooms, and long, dark hallways leave me with few words. And too, I am taken with Mrs. Marjorie’s relentless laughter that pushes back the sadness, so I just listen, watch.


She creaks about the kitchen, her hunched back crowned with thin silver hair, wiry like a worn steel brush.

She stands in a stream of light now, slathering butter generously on two slabs of steaming brown and I wonder of the austere stories she never tells me but the community rumors. I want to ask her if its true: that Goldie Knight plainly proposed to her forty years ago because he thought it cheaper to marry her than pay out her weekly wage as the hired girl.

That she really bent over piles of manure in the cow stanchions, pitchfork in hand, only to hear the barn filling with voices of neighbor men. Mortified of being found forking manure like a man, work that no husband would rightly have a wife do in that day and age, it's reported she laid down in the rank muck to hide from the shame. Mr. Locking said not a word to Goldie, but told every farmer on the twelfth line what he witnessed in the Knight’s barn.

And too he said how Goldie Knight felt no shame driving horses down the field, or showing one of his sons how to hold the reins, while Mrs. Marjorie forked and tossed all the manure off the wagon, softly singing hymns. Just that Goldie blithely boasted that she was much cheaper than a chain driven manure spreader, and could unload nearly as fast.

I confess, I felt no sadness the day my mama pressed phone receiver close to her ear to hear the news on the party line: Goldie Knight had dropped dead of a heart attack that morning coming up the lane from getting the mail.

He was 48 years old when he collapsed under the pines.

Mrs. Marjorie looked a haggard sixty-five, but for her deeply etched smile and child-like laugh that softly shook that humped back.

Her oldest boy ignored the will. (What hired girl really stands to inherit land?) He took over the farm and its profits, and left Mrs. Marjorie with a pile of wood to split and stack if she intended to keep warm on howling winter nights.

The son asked the neighbor women to take his mother to town for food once a month. My Mama picked Mrs. Marjorie up for Sunday morning services at the yellow-bricked Knox Presbyterian at the end of the road, and sent me down on summer evenings to bend over rows of beans with Mrs. Marjorie, pulling out meddlesome red-root pigweed.

Mrs. Marjorie knew about hunching over work.


“Like this, girl,” she chuckled. “If you lean so, you can use both hands to pull. There. Now we fly,” she laughed lightly, like sun falling soft and dappled through bean leaves.

But sitting there fingering the frayed edge of her tablecloth, watching her pour the fresh milk that Mrs. Noreen Barlow brought weekly, I wonder if Mrs. Knight’s arched spine was, in some way, about faithfully protecting the fragile flame of joy that flickers in the cup of the soul.

She keeps hers well.

The oncologist who found the cancer filling Mrs. Marjorie sent her home to die. And yet here she stood, living and laughing.

My father said it a thousand times if he said it once, “What keeps that woman alive is a medicine no doctor can give you. That joy of hers is healing her.”

I could see it, as she hobbled over with my glass of milk and slice of bread. Her joy was wholly, always, hers. She had spent a lifetime of giving, but she gave no person or circumstance the responsibility of tending the wick of her happy light. She solely took her happiness up as her own. Committed to kindle and guard it, stoke and shield it. Preserve it.

She kept her light.

I swallow cool milk and mouthfuls of melting bread that evening in Mrs. Marjorie’s kitchen. But its her life that fills me now: One is always responsible for one’s response.

Isn’t that what holiness is? To be "response-able," able to respond like Him who is our Light of happiness.

The wind, indifferent and cool, can rush up through the pines. But aren't we each response-able for keeping joy's flame glowing? To be light-keepers.

I eat bread and think of illuminated soul of a gentle, hunched-back sage.

Joy kept her warm.


:::

Lord, today winds blow. Remind me that I'm 'response-able' for tending my own joy light: Joy in You. Joy that warms. Can anything snuff that out?

Today, make me a Light-Keeper.



Repost from the archives

Related: My Happy Light, Pt 1 ... Happy Light, Pt 2
Count Joy
~~
Andrea at the Flourishing Mother's series on Fighting for Joy
John Piper's: How Shall We Fight for Joy?
Listen to John Piper: How to Fight for Joy, Part 3, How to Fight for Joy, Part 2, How to Fight for Joy, Part 1

Photos: warm light caught in pines, seen with Rachel last Saturday. Used with permission from Rachel G.