* * *
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I do it because it’s time-consuming.
Whoever said that something worthwhile shouldn’t take time? It took months for the Pilgrims to sail to Plymouth Rock. It took years for George Washington to win the Revolutionary War. And it took decades for the pioneers to conquer the West.
Time is that which God uses to separate the idle from the industrious. For time is a mountain and upon seeing its steep incline, the idle will lie down among the lilies of the field and hope that someone passes by with a pitcher of lemonade. What the worthy endeavor requires is planning, effort, attentiveness, and the willingness to clean up.
* * *
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I do it because it’s old-fashioned.
Just because something’s new doesn’t mean it’s better; and often enough, it means it’s worse.
Saying please and thank you is plenty old-fashioned. Getting married and raising children is old-fashioned. Traditions, the very means by which we come to know who we are, are nothing if not old-fashioned.
I make preserves in the manner that was taught to me by my mother, God rest her soul. She made preserves in the manner that was taught to her by her mother, and Grandma made preserves in the manner that was taught to her by hers. And so on, and so forth, back through the ages all the way to Eve. Or, at least as far as Martha.
* * *
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And I do it because it’s unnecessary.
For what is kindness but the performance of an act that is both beneficial to another and unrequired? There is no kindness in paying a bill. There is no kindness in getting up at dawn to slop the pigs, or milk the cows, or gather the eggs from the henhouse. For that matter, there is no kindness in making dinner, or in cleaning the kitchen after your father heads upstairs without so much as a word of thanks.
There is no kindness in latching the doors and turning out the lights, or in picking up the clothes from the bathroom floor in order to put them in the hamper. There is no kindness in taking care of a household because your only sister had the good sense to get herself married and move to Pensacola.
Nope, I said to myself while climbing into bed and switching off the light, there is no kindness in any of that.
For kindness begins where necessity ends.
Duchess
Having come upstairs after supper, I was about to flop down on Emmett’s bed when I noticed the smoothness of the covers. After freezing in place for a moment, I leaned over the mattress to get a closer look.
There was no question about it. She had remade it.
I thought I’d done a pretty good job, if I do say so myself. But Sally had done a better one. There wasn’t a ripple on the surface. And where the sheet gets folded at the top of the blanket, there was a four-inch-high rectangle of white running from one edge of the bed to the other as if she had measured it with a ruler. While at the base, she had tucked in the covers so tightly that you could see the corners of the mattress through the surface of the blanket, the way you can see Jane Russell through the surface of her sweater.
It was such a thing of beauty, I didn’t want to disturb it until I was ready to go to bed. So I sat on the floor, leaned against the wall, and gave some thought to the Watson brothers, as I waited for everyone else to fall asleep.
* * *
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Earlier that day when I had gotten back to the house, Woolly and Billy were still lying out on the grass.
—How was your walk? asked Woolly.
—Rejuvenating, I replied. What have you two been up to?
—Billy has been reading me some of the stories from Professor Abernathe’s book.
—Sorry I missed that. Which ones?
Billy was in the middle of running down the list when Emmett pulled into the drive.
Speaking of stories, I thought to myself . . .
In another moment, Emmett was going to emerge from his car a little worse for wear. He was certainly going to have a fat lip and some bruises; he might even have the beginnings of a shiner. The question was how was he going to explain them? Did he trip on a crack in the sidewalk? Did he tumble down a set of stairs?
In my experience, the best explanations make use of the unexpected. Like: I was crossing the lawn of the courthouse admiring the sight of a whip-poor-will perched on the branch of a tree when a football hit me in the face. With an explanation like that, your listener is so focused on the whip-poor-will up in the tree, they never see the football coming.
But when Emmett walked over and a wide-eyed Billy asked what had happened, Emmett said that he’d run into Jake Snyder while in town, and Jake had hit him. Just like that.
I turned to Billy, expecting an expression of shock or maybe outrage, but he was nodding his head and looking thoughtful.