The Frame Went With Him

The days had a frame and she did not know it was a frame until it was gone.

Half past six, the kettle, because he was up. Seven, the radio, which she did not choose and did not like for the first fifteen years and now cannot bear the silence of. Eight, the tablets on the windowsill, his and then hers. Half past ten, out to the shed for something, or the pretense of something. Twelve, dinner, which is what they called it and she is not going to start calling it lunch at seventy nine. Two, the sit down. Four, the tea. Six, the news. Nine, the stairs, slow, with a hand on the rail and one on his back.

Fifty one years of it.

He went on a Tuesday afternoon in October, which is a strange time of day for a thing like that, and there was a great deal to do for about three weeks and everybody was very kind, and then everybody went home.

And the frame went with him.

She is not falling apart. She would want that in writing. She eats, she goes to the shop, she goes on a Sunday and she has not missed one. Her daughter rings on Thursdays and she is truthful with her, mostly.

It is the hours.

She stands in that kitchen at eleven in the morning and she does not know what eleven is for. It has never once been a thing on its own. It was the bit between the shed and dinner. And now it is an hour, with edges nowhere, and she stands in the middle of it and cannot get hold of it, and by four in the afternoon she could not tell you what happened in it.

She is seventy nine. She has buried her parents and a brother and now a husband and she has never once in her life not known what the day was for.

Last week she said something out loud to the window, which is where she says things now.

She said: I do not know what any of this is for.

You know that hour. Yours may be a different one, or a Sunday, or a whole autumn. But you know what it is to have a shape leave with a person, and to be left standing in the middle of a time with no edges on it.

Over a thing with no edges

Let me name the pit first, and it is not the grief.

The grief is right and it is yours and nobody is going to hurry it or improve it here. The pit is separate and it is this: a woman who has always known what the hour was for has met an hour that is not for anything, and has concluded, somewhere under the words, that the hour being shapeless means she is now shapeless, and that at seventy nine there is nothing to be done about it.

Here is the second sentence in the Bible. Read it slow.

The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:2

Without form. Void. Dark. An hour with no edges on it, at the start of everything.

And Scripture does not report that as a disaster. It states it plainly, and then it tells you who was over it, and the word for what the Spirit was doing is a brooding word. Deuteronomy 32:11 uses the same picture for an eagle spreading herself over her nest and over her young. A bird over a nest.

Now I teach one thing about the Hebrew, and I draw the line in the same breath, because on this ground the two never travel apart. The word for Spirit there is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and in Hebrew it is a feminine word, so the verb beside it takes a feminine form, exactly as it would beside the word for a hand or a house. Grammar is not sex. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and Scripture describes Him with a father's traits and a mother's both, and the bird over the nest is one of the motherly pictures and He chose it Himself. It does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true, and true is what a woman standing in a kitchen at eleven actually needs.

Take that at your own table, and know it is not me being gentle with an old woman, it is the second sentence of the Bible. You are being brooded over in an hour that has no edges. Genesis 1:2 puts the Spirit over a formless thing before anything at all was made, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been over that kitchen at eleven in the morning every day since October.

And the next verse tells you where a shape comes from.

And God said, Let there be light.Genesis 1:3

From above. By a word. The deep did not organize itself into days and hours; it was spoken into them while it was being hovered over, and its whole job in the meanwhile was to be there.

You do not have to build a new frame at seventy nine, and the not knowing is not a failure of yours. I am not making light of fifty one years; that frame was real and it was good and half of it was love. But it was never the thing holding you, and the One who was is over an unmade hour exactly as He was over an unmade world.