It Will Not Be As Good As It Was

She knows exactly what it was, because she was there for the whole of it.

The joinery, which was done by a man who is dead now and whose like is not available at any price. The glass. The particular way the light came across it at about four in the afternoon in the autumn, which she could not describe to you and could not forget.

What she could put back would be plain and small.

She could do it. That is the thing. It is not beyond her, and there is money enough for the plain version, and she has had the measurements written on the back of an envelope in a drawer for three years.

And she has not done it.

Because everybody who remembers the first one would see it at once. They would be kind. They would say it is lovely and some of them would mean it. And she would stand there knowing that she is the one who put up the lesser version, and that from now on the lesser version is what the place is.

So there is a bare place where a good thing used to be.

She has told herself for three years that this is respect. That leaving it empty honors what was there better than replacing it with something ordinary would.

Her son said something last month that she has not been able to put down.

He said, Mama, it does not have to match.

And she said I know, in the voice that ends a subject, and he let it go the way he lets things go.

Here is what she has not said to him or to anybody.

She is no longer certain that it is respect. She has begun to wonder, quietly, on this porch, whether what she has actually been protecting is herself, and whether three years of a bare place is a thing she chose for the sake of the first one or for the sake of never being the woman who put up the second.

If you cannot bear to build the smaller version, come up and take the rocker. Nobody out here is going to look at anything.

The afternoon they wept and shouted at once

There is a day in Ezra that is one of the most honest scenes in Scripture, and hardly anybody preaches it because it refuses to resolve.

But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud for joy: so that the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people.Ezra 3:12-13

They laid a foundation. It was smaller. Everybody present who was old enough to remember could see exactly how much smaller.

And the old men wept. Out loud. On the day of the good news, in front of everybody, at the top of their voices.

Nobody stopped them. Nobody took them aside and explained that this was a day for gratitude. The record simply says both sounds went up together and could not be told apart.

You are allowed to grieve the first one out loud on the very day you begin the second. Ezra 3:12 puts the weeping of the ancient men and the shouting of the people in one moment and refuses to separate them, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept both sounds in the record rather than tidying the day into a celebration, which means the sorrow you have been treating as a reason not to start is written into Scripture as part of starting.

What three years of bare has actually been

Now the bare place, and let us go gently, because there is a hard thing here and it has already been half seen from that rocker. Leaving it empty has felt like loyalty.

But an empty place is not a monument. Nobody visiting that spot in ten years will know that a fine thing stood there and was honored by absence. They will see a gap, and eventually they will see nothing at all, because gaps stop registering.

You have been protecting a memory with a method that does not preserve it. Joshua 4:6 has stones set up so that when your children ask in time to come, saying, what mean ye by these stones, there is something to point at, and it is the Spirit of God who keeps a testimony alive across generations, which means the thing that carries the first one forward is a marker rather than a space.

The plain version is not a replacement of the good one. It is the only available way for anybody to know there was ever anything there.

The sentence she has not been able to put down

Now the thing her son said, and the question underneath it that has been circling on this porch ever since. He said it does not have to match.

And what you have been asking yourself since is whether three years was for the first one or for you.

You were not protecting yourself out of vanity, and there is no charge being brought about it either way. Psalm 103:14 says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and it is written as the reason for God's tenderness rather than as an allowance, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Comforter rather than the examiner, so whatever mixture of motives has been on this porch for three years is being handled gently and not audited.