The Rum in the Baking Cupboard

The fruit goes in the jar in about September, and it sits in the dark until it is ready, and the whole thing takes three months and it is the same three months every year since her grandmother came over in the fifties.

Yvette is fifty one. She makes the black cake. She learned it from her mother, who learned it from her grandmother, and there are four families on that street who get one every year and have got one every year since before Yvette was born.

The bottle for it lives in the baking cupboard behind the flour and the big bowl, which is the cupboard she is in and out of two or three times a week, because that is also where the raising agents live and the vanilla and the tins.

She stopped drinking three years ago.

It has nothing to do with the cake. She wants that understood, because it is important: the cake is not the problem and the cake is never going to be the problem. The problem, if it is even a problem, is a much smaller and more ordinary thing, which is that she is in that cupboard on a Tuesday afternoon looking for baking powder, not thinking about anything at all, and there it is behind the flour.

Two or three times a week, all year, for a cake she makes in September.

She has thought about moving it. She has not, because it lives there, because it is baking, because her mother would ask why the rum was in the pantry now, and because there is no answer to that question that is a small answer.

You know that cupboard. It might be baking, or cooking, or a bottle kept for something. It has a legitimate reason to be exactly where it is. Nobody put it there against you, and it is folded into something you love and would not give up.

You have a table full of people as the picture of the blessing, and you were never given a kitchen as the point of it. The psalm says thy children like olive plants round about thy table, and it puts the blessing in the people rather than in the room; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live fact for a woman standing at a cupboard in September.

Round about thy table

Let me name the thing exactly, because it is the smallest one in this whole category and that is what makes it worth naming.

It is not the cake and it is not the tradition and it is not your mother. It is that a cupboard you use for ordinary things has something in it that you meet without warning, two or three times a week, when you were thinking about baking powder. It costs a second. And it has cost a second, two or three times a week, for three years, and nobody has any idea because there is nothing to tell.

And nothing here is going to tell you to move it or to stop making the cake or to say something to your mother. That cake has four families on a street waiting for it and it has outlived two generations, and you are not going to be the one who ends it, and you should not be.

Here is the psalm.

Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.Psalm 128:3

That is the picture of blessing in that psalm. Not a temple. Not a battle won. A vine at the side of a house and children round a table, which is to say: an ordinary domestic scene, described in agricultural terms, in a kitchen.

You are living inside the picture Scripture uses for blessing, and you were never told the blessing was somewhere more impressive. That is what stands written in Psalm 128, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a description of a kitchen with a bowl of soaking fruit in it.

And the phrase round about thy table is worth stopping on. It is a spatial description: the table is the center and the people are arranged around it. In that picture the table is not the point either. The table is what the people are arranged around. The whole scene is people, located.

You are looking at people arranged around a table, and you were never being blessed with the furniture. Scripture puts the children round about and makes them the content of the picture, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a woman's eye on what a kitchen is actually for.

And here is the line that changes a cupboard. The next verse says: behold, that thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord. Thus. Like this. In this manner. It is God's own summary of what a blessed life looks like, and it looks like a house with people in it and food on a table, which is exactly the thing you have been quietly protecting for three years by making a cake in September and not making a fuss about a cupboard.

You are protecting the very thing God calls blessing, and you were never doing something small. The written word says thus shall the man be blessed and points at a domestic scene, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman see her own kitchen as the thing rather than as the obstacle.

And the plain thing, which is said in every article here and meant. Three years of a one second thing two or three times a week, entirely unmentioned, is worth telling one person. A friend, a counselor, your doctor, the room where people say true things out loud. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and it takes nothing away from your mother, your cake or your street.