The Sideboard on the Landing

Nell cooked for a farm for twenty six years, and every one of those years she lived in a cottage that came with the job.

Tied cottages are a particular education. The rule of them is simple and nobody has to say it out loud: the cottage is not yours, the job might end, and whatever you own has to fit in a car on a Saturday. So Nell learned the discipline of a woman who could be somewhere else by Monday. Everything folded, everything nested, everything went in one boot with the seats down. She had a camping kettle for eleven years while living in a house with a range.

Then the farm sold up, and there was a small cottage on the edge of a village with her name on the door and nothing tied to it at all, and Nell moved in with a car and a half.

About a month later her friend Delphine came up the lane with a trailer, and on the trailer, roped under a tarpaulin and leaning slightly, was an upright piano.

Nell had not had a piano since she was nineteen. You cannot take a piano to a tied cottage. You cannot take a piano anywhere without four people and a bad afternoon, and every time in twenty six years that a piano had come up, in a saleroom or a neighbor's front room or a church hall clearing out, the answer had been the same and it had never once felt like a sacrifice, because it was simply the truth.

Nell stood in her own doorway, in a house nobody could ask her to leave, and she said: where would I even put it.

Delphine, who had known her for thirty years and had already begun untying the ropes, did not answer that. She said: it is not going back on the trailer, Nell.

There is a sideboard on your landing.

Nine days now. Oak, mid century, a good deep one with three drawers, left there by the woman in the flat above who is moving down to be near her daughter and did not want it going to a skip. She knocked, she offered, you said something polite and unfinished, and she took that for a yes and had her sons carry it as far as your door.

And there it has stood. You edge past it going out. You edge past it coming in. And every single time you do, you run the same silent calculation, which is not about whether it would fit in the alcove, because it would fit in the alcove perfectly and you measured it on day two.

The calculation is about the stairs. Half a turn, a narrow landing, and a first floor. Four men and a bad afternoon.

Four years at this address now, and a year of it settled enough that nothing has actually gone wrong. And everything in the flat is still something one person could carry. That is not an accident and you know it is not an accident.

The basket you carry in with both hands

There is a chapter of Deuteronomy written for exactly the man standing on that landing, and it is not the chapter anybody expects.

It is a liturgy. A short script, given to a person who has just come into a place after a very long time of not having one, to be said out loud while holding something. The instruction is that you take the first of the fruit of your ground, put it in a basket, carry it to the place God chooses, and hand it over. And then, standing there with your hands empty, you say a piece aloud.

The piece begins in a way nobody would design. It begins: my father was a wandering Aramean.

Not a triumph. Not a summary of how far he had come. The first sentence out of the mouth of a man who finally has ground under him names the wandering, out loud, in public, on the good day. The Spirit had that written into the liturgy on purpose, because a man who has arrived somewhere carries the years of not having anywhere in his body, and Deuteronomy 26 does not ask him to pretend otherwise before he is allowed to be glad.

Then the script runs through the whole of it. The going down, the hard labor, the crying out, the bringing out, the arriving. And at the end of that long honest sentence comes the line that this whole chapter has been walking toward.

And you shall rejoice in all the good that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house, you and the Levite and the stranger who is among you.Deuteronomy 26:11

Notice the grammar, because it is not an invitation and it is not a suggestion for a person who feels up to it. It is an imperative. Rejoice. You have permission that arrives in the form of an order, which is God's kindest way of handling somebody who cannot give himself permission, and the Holy Spirit is the One pressing that imperative into a man edging past a sideboard on the ninth day.

And look at who is in the sentence. You, and your house, and the Levite, and the stranger. The Levite is the man with no allotment of land at all. The stranger is the man who is not from here. God builds the two most unsettled people in the whole community into the middle of the command to be glad, which means the gladness was never reserved for people whose position is secure.

Now read what the verse does not say, because this is where you have been quietly waiting for the catch. It does not say rejoice because it will last. It does not name a term, guarantee a tenancy, or say a word about next year. It says rejoice in all the good that has been given, which is a sentence about what is in your hands rather than a forecast about what is under your feet. That is written, and it is written that way deliberately, and the Spirit has never once slipped a clause about next year in underneath it.

What the good thing is not

So the sideboard is not a bet.

You have been treating it as one. Let it in and you have taken a position on staying, and if the year turns you will have to unmake the position in front of everybody, and there is a particular flavour of shame in carrying your own optimism back down a staircase. I know that flavour. Deuteronomy 26 knows it too, which is why it starts a glad man off by making him say the word wandering, and the Spirit is not embarrassed by the part of you that is still counting the stairs.

But that is not what receiving is. A basket of first fruit was not a prediction. It was an acknowledgement of what was actually in a man's hands in that particular year, carried in with both arms, handed over, and enjoyed at a table with people who owned nothing. You are allowed to hold a good thing without insuring it.

And here is the part that settles it either way. If you are still at this address next year, the sideboard is where the plates live. If you are not, then it is oak, and oak has been moved before, and the God who gave it to you and to your house is not renting it back from you on condition of your staying. You are His at this address and you are His at any other one. Nothing in Deuteronomy 26 was conditional on the man never moving again, and the Spirit has never once made your welcome depend on your postcode.