The Bowl of Blackberries I Put Down

The bowl is a white one with a chip out of the rim, and it sat on the counter with the blackberries in it for four days until they went over.

She had not gone out to pick any. She walked down the lane on the Tuesday because the bin was already out for the morning and there was nothing else to do with the afternoon. The brambles are at the far end where the lane turns, up on the bank, and they were black and heavy and hanging low enough to reach without the stick.

So she picked. Not a handful. Forty minutes of it, one arm in through the canes for the good ones at the back, thumbing off the ones that come away too easily. Scratches up her wrist. Juice on the side of her hand. A wasp she talked to.

And somewhere in the middle of those forty minutes she was humming.

She heard it. That is what happened. She heard her own voice going in her chest, some tune with no name on it, and her mouth was full of the sweetness of one she had eaten straight off the cane, and the September sun was low enough to come sideways through the hedge. For a stretch of minutes she had been happy.

She stopped. Not dramatically, nothing anybody would have seen. She just stopped humming, and finished the row she was on, and walked back up the lane with the bowl held against her hip.

She put it on the counter.

Then she washed her hands and wiped the juice off the side of the sink, and did not make anything with them, and did not eat any more of them, and every time she went past that bowl over the next four days she felt something she has never given a name to. On the Saturday she tipped them into the compost and rinsed the bowl out.

Two years ago this month she would have made a pie, and he would have eaten half of it standing up before it had properly cooled, which used to annoy her, and she has never once been able to say out loud that she misses being annoyed.

She did not put the berries down because she had stopped wanting them. She put them down because for forty minutes she had forgotten to be a woman whose husband is dead, and being caught at it felt like something she owed somebody an apology for.

That is what this is about. Not the bowl.

What was in their mouths in a ruined city

Nothing here is going to measure you, and nothing here is going to tell you that two years is long enough to be laughing by. That accounting has been running in your own head without any help from me, and I would not hand you a timetable if I had one, because there is not one and anybody who offers you one is guessing out loud.

There is a short psalm that opens on a people who have just been handed back something they had stopped expecting, and the first thing it reaches for is not a word about joy. The phrase in Psalm 126:1 is that they were like those who dream. Not glad. Dreaming, as in unable to put their weight on the floor in case it is not there. And the Spirit sets that in front of a woman coming up a lane with juice on her hand: you are standing in the doorway those people were standing in, and not one of them apologized for being in it.

Here is the psalm.

When the Lord brought back the captives of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with joyful singing. Then they said among the nations, "The Lord has done great things for them."Psalm 126:1-2

Now read the grammar, because the grammar is the whole thing.

Psalm 126:2 does not say they decided to laugh. It says their mouth was filled with laughter, filled, by somebody, from outside, the way a jug is filled at a tap. And the Holy Spirit is holding that verb in front of a woman who believes a hum in a hedge was a decision she made against her husband: you have never in your life manufactured a good moment, and you did not manufacture that one either.

The humming was not an opinion you formed about your loss. It was not a verdict you passed on how much you miss him. It arrived in your chest the way birdsong arrives in a lane, from somewhere that was not you, while your hands were busy with a bramble.

Then look at who is doing the laughing in that psalm, because it is not a crowd of people whose troubles are over. These are people standing in a city with the walls down. And four verses further into the same song they are still asking God to bring the rest of their people home, still praying for water in a dry country, nothing finished, nothing tidy. The laughter and the unfinished asking are in the same psalm, on the same page, and neither one cancels the other out. His Spirit is not asking you to pick between them: you have both in the one breath, and Scripture is where they were put side by side.

That is the sentence I would want a woman in that kitchen to hear. You do not have to be done grieving to be allowed a good forty minutes. The people whose mouths God filled were not done either.

Nothing was taken from him when you hummed

Somebody will have told you that laughing again is a sign you are healing. Somebody else will have implied that it is a sign you have moved on. Neither of those sentences is written anywhere in Scripture, and the Holy Spirit has never once stood at the end of a lane totting up what a hum is supposed to mean. What is written is that God filled their mouths: you have no obligation to interpret a good afternoon, and no obligation to grade it either.

And if there has been no good afternoon in your lane, if this is the month it happened and there is nothing humming anywhere in you, nothing here asks you to produce one. That psalm has a verse in the middle of it that is still asking God to bring people back. It is safe to be in that verse.

The Holy Spirit is doing one thing in that kitchen this evening and it is not a large thing. He is standing on Psalm 126:2 and taking the apology out of your mouth. You have nothing to apologize for: not the humming, not the sweetness of the one off the cane, not the forty minutes, not the fact that for a stretch of a Tuesday afternoon you were simply a woman on a bank in the sun.

Loving him was never a job you clock into. It does not lapse when you are enjoying something else, and a good afternoon takes nothing off the top of it.

That is not my opinion about a bowl of blackberries. That is what the Spirit has been pressing through Psalm 126:1-2 into a house where good things get tipped into the compost on a Saturday, and you have been filing it as a psalm about somebody else's homecoming. You are allowed to eat what you picked.