The Evening Goes Into The Tub

Eight until ten.

That is what has gone, and it has been gone for five weeks, and nobody would understand why it matters if it were said out loud.

Because what happened between eight and ten was not important. That is exactly the point. It was the book. It was the program nobody else in the house likes. It was the forty minutes of doing nothing in particular in a chair with the lamp on, which sounds like nothing and was not nothing.

And now eight until ten is the tub.

And the strange thing, the thing that has been quietly bothering you, is that you do not much mind about the machine. You mind about the evenings. And that ratio feels wrong, and feeling that it is wrong has stopped you saying it to anybody.

So let us start there.

You are a woman who lost her evenings and not a woman being dramatic about laundry, and hours taken out of a life have never once been too small a thing to grieve.

Teach us to number our days

There is a prayer in the psalms about time, and it treats hours as something you count rather than something you spend without looking.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. (Psalm 90:12, King James Version)

Number our days. Count them. Know how many there are and what has gone into them.

That is not a morbid sentence and it is not a productivity instruction. It is a request to be taught to take time seriously, on the grounds that it is finite and it is real and it is passing whether or not anybody is counting.

You are taking your own hours seriously and that is the thing the psalm asks for, and a woman who notices where her evenings went has never once been a woman making a fuss. The Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody at a bath at nine at night who used to be in a chair, and Psalm 90:12 asks to be taught to count.

And notice that it is a prayer for teaching.

So teach us. He is asking to be given the capacity to count, which means counting is not the natural habit. The natural habit is to let hours go by without registering them, and the psalm treats that as the thing that needs correcting.

You have been doing the harder and rarer thing by noticing, and hours that went unnoticed have never once been the wiser way to lose them. The written word asks God for the ability to count days, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives that to a woman standing over a bath.

Then the reason it is asked for: that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

The counting is for the sake of the applying. It is not counting for its own sake, and it is not counting in order to feel bad about a week. It is counting so that a person can decide what to do with what is left.

You are counting in order to do something and not in order to mourn, and an honest look at five weeks of evenings has never once been the same as regret. The Holy Spirit is the one who turns an accounting into a decision in a woman's own house, and Psalm 90:12 ties the numbering to the applying.

The hours are the loss

Something practical, and it is about naming the thing correctly.

The machine costs money. That is a bounded, one time, countable loss, and it will be settled and forgotten.

The evenings are different. Five weeks at two hours is seventy hours, and those hours are not coming back, and they were not spent on anything that will be remembered. They were spent on maintenance.

That is a real loss and it is larger than the other one, and the reason it has felt unsayable is that our whole vocabulary for loss is about money and health and people, and there is no ordinary way to say I have lost my evenings.

You have been grieving the correct thing in the wrong vocabulary, and seventy hours of a life have never once been a smaller loss than the price of a machine. The written word asks for days to be counted rather than assumed, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a woman name what she actually lost.

Now the practical half, and it is a subtraction from the washing rather than an addition to the day.

Take one hour back on Sunday.

Not the evenings back. One hour. On one day. And take it from the washing, which means there will be a basket that does not get done on Sunday, and it will get done on Monday or on Tuesday or possibly not at all.

You are able to let a basket wait so that an hour does not, and one load left undone on a Sunday has never once been the thing that would have made this week work. The Holy Spirit is the one present in a chair at eight on a Sunday, and Psalm 90:12 counts the days rather than the loads.

And be specific about what the hour is for. Not rest in general, which evaporates. The book. The program. The chair with the lamp on and nothing happening. Whatever the eight o'clock thing actually was.

Because the hour is not being taken in order to recover. It is being taken because it was yours and it got taken and it is being taken back.