Good Fruit. Unexpected Blessings.

Fruit Blessing

Fruit Blessing

Sunlight’s strewed across the maple syrup brown concrete floor.

My barefoot takes cool from the floor. Across the lobby’s expanse, day’s end sun carves shadows four, five times taller than the metal door frames.

One door clatters open, startles me. Older woman, maybe, almost elfin and with two cloth satchels that pull her arms down straight, sidles through before the door clatters closed.

She smiles as she puts both bags in the chair beside me. She says, “I’ll sit here,” pointing to the 3rd chair, “and I must wash my hands. I won’t be but a moment.”

She’s not. An almost scurry-step brings her back across the lobby from the ladies room. As she nears our chairs — hers, the satchels’, and mine — she smiles again. “Would you like a snack? I have some fruit.”

“No, thank you. I just had a too-big sandwich before I got here.”

“Are you sure? I have good fruit.” She lifts a brown paper lunch bag from one satchel. She repeats, “I have good fruit.”

Somehow I know to ask, “What good fruit do you have?” I remember to smile.

I notice she wears a name tag, turned halfway upside down. Ann. She slowly, dramatically draws a ziplocked bag with apple slices. “I have apples.”

Her hand goes again into the bag. She pauses, as if waiting for me to guess. I raise my eyebrows, my “I don’t know but show me” expression.

Her hand emerges from the bag with a perfectly orange orange. Cradling it so, so gently, she offers it to me with the simple blessing: “Orange!”

“No, and thank you, Ann. What other fruit do you have?”

She looks into the bag, expecting to be surprised. Almost as if she cannot see the bottom, she lifts her hand in a high arc and dives it into the bag. Quickly it appears and she grins. “It’s a plum! Doesn’t it look delicious!”

It does. It truly does.

“I’ll let you go on with your writing. And writing by hand. I like that. It makes you part of what you write. I’ll be quiet for you and your writing.”

I drew a line across the page. I started writing what you see here.

Blessings Unexpected

Good Friend God!
What beautiful abundant joy you share
in such simple, unexpected ways. Thank you
for the gift and even more
thank you for the awareness to recognize,
to receive, and to accept the gift.
And so it is. And so we thank you, Good Friend.

Love and blessings,
Tim

20 June 2017

Posted on June 20, 2017 at 11:49 am by Tim · Permalink
In: Beauty, Grace, Gratitude, Grounded, Humility, Joy · Tagged with: , , , ,