recycle

Her children arise and call her blessed...Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all. (Proverbs 31:28,29)

Mother reaches into the box again
and proffers another baby blanket,
soft flannelette
with hours of love
crocheted around the border,
good shower gifts for family and beyond.
"These are the last I can sell for five dollars
with the cost of flannelette rising again,"
she says wistfully.
My wife buys several.
There follow T shirts of recycled material,
scraps of material fashioned into doll blankets
and more.

Hands still busy after eight-five years.
She, who learned reduce, reuse, recycle
in subsistence prairie farming
long before ecological correctness,
conserves, reuses, creates and recreates.
Herself recycled from schoolgirl
to farmer’s wife to merchant to retiree.
She has shaped and reshaped love
to four generations.
Hands slower now and more deliberate.

Mother, it’s okay
to reduce your locus of activity,
to recycle to other hands,
to rest from labour,
to reuse memories,
reshaped into blankets of love and prayer
covering your family and beyond,
as God, the great recycler,
continues to recreate you.

–Alvin Ens (from Musing on the Sermon © 2002 - used with permission)

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Alvin Ens writes from his home in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Now retired from teaching in the public school system, he himself is recycled as a volunteer teacher in the prison system. He also ably presides over the Fraser Valley Christian Writers Group, a dandy little group of which I am a member.