The Sunday Letter
Misti and I have a morning ritual we hold to as much as life will allow. Coffee, the two of us, and a little quiet before the day asks anything of us. Most mornings we take it in our own chairs at the house, but this week we carried it with us and strolled through a park instead, sipping the same small joy we reach for every morning, only this time with the sights and sounds of early risers and motivated sellers coming to life all around us.
The park was in full setup for a local farmers market. Tents were going up and tables were being unfolded, and it struck me that the hopes of the folks behind them were rising right along with the canvas. You could feel the season turning in what they were setting out. The harvest is making that shift right now, moving on from the last of the summer things, the tomatoes and okra and peppers, the eggplant and figs and watermelon, over to the ones that tell you fall has truly arrived: apples and pears and muscadines, sweet potatoes and pumpkins and winter squash, persimmons, and before long the pecans.
We got to see all of it before the crowds came, in that unguarded early hour when a market is still just people laying out the fruit of their work and hoping somebody shows up for it. We found a bench and sat a while and took it in. The hard work behind every table, the preparation, and the reward waiting on both sides of it, for the one who grew the thing and the one who would carry it home. It is an old, old practice, and it was being renewed again right in front of us that morning, the way it is renewed all across the South every week this time of year. What we really found on that bench was a piece of the South as genuine as it gets. Good people, good food, and a good time of year to be alive in this corner of God’s amazing creation.
That morning left me in a thankful frame of mind, and it turns out this is exactly the right month for one.
Fair season is coming on down here, too. In a few weeks the fairgrounds that sit empty most of the year will light up all over the South, and whole counties will file through the gates to ride the rides and eat things no doctor would defend. But walk past the midway sometime, back to the quiet barns where the real fair happens. That is where you find the tables. Jars of tomatoes and bread-and-butter pickles lined up straight as a choir. Quilts a year in the making. A pound cake with a blue ribbon on it and a story behind it. Pumpkins the size of a washtub, raised by somebody who checked on them every evening like they were livestock.
A fair is a county laying its year out on folding tables. That is all it is, and that is everything it is. Every jar on those tables holds a season of somebody’s life: the seed they buried in the spring, the rows they watered through the worst of the summer, the recipe that passed through three sets of hands before it got to theirs. And here is the part I cannot get past. Not one bit of it started with us. Nobody has ever made a seed. Nobody sends up the rain. We plant and we tend and we sweat, and all of that matters, but the growing itself is done by Somebody else entirely. The fair pins ribbons on the growers, and every honest grower will tell you they mostly showed up and cooperated.
I think that is why harvest season sits so well on this part of the country. The South has always been a place that says thank you out loud, before meals, after storms pass, when the rows are finally done. Gratitude is not so much a mood down here as it is a habit, and fall is when the habit gets its proof laid out on tables for everybody to walk past and admire. You do not have to grow a thing to take part in it, either. You can walk through and simply be glad. Somebody’s whole year is on that table, and gladness for another person’s harvest is its own kind of crop.
So here is what I am carrying into this week, and you are welcome to carry it too. Take a little inventory before the season gets loud. Not of what went wrong this year, because that list keeps itself. Take an inventory of what was handed to you: the people, the provision, the near misses, the ordinary days that only look ordinary because there were so many of them. Name a few out loud if it helps. I expect you will run out of breath before you run out of things to name.
Take a minute with that today. Then go say thank you to somebody, out loud.
That’s the week. See you next Sunday.
The South, Shared.
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
Not every year ends in blue ribbons. I wrote up above about harvests and full tables, and maybe you read it with a knot in your chest, because this was not that kind of year at your house. The garden failed, or the job did, or this was the year that cost you somebody you loved. Harvest season is a hard season to stand in when your own year came up lean. Everybody else’s jars catch the light, and you are over here doing the math on what you lost.
So this part is for the lean year, and it starts with where every good thing actually comes from.
“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” — James 1:17
James calls Him the Father of lights, and then says the remarkable thing: with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Every light we know varies. The sun climbs and sinks, the days are shortening right now as I write this, porch bulbs burn out, and harvests come in fat one year and thin the next. James says the Giver is not like the gifts. The gifts come and go on their own seasons. The One they come down from does not move at all. A lean year can empty your table without ever once touching the goodness of the God above it.
I will admit how backwards I get this. When the good things stack up, I am quick to credit my own two hands, and when they thin out, I start wondering what changed in heaven. Nothing did. Nothing does. That is the whole point of the verse, and I have had to relearn it in more than one thin season of my own.
So if you are counting losses this fall instead of ribbons, do not let anybody rush you past the ache of it, and do not read a shadow on your year as a shadow on your God. There is no variation in Him. The gifts have their seasons, but the Giver holds still, the way a porch light holds still behind you all the way down the drive. It is on tonight, and it is on for you.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.