The Light from Heaven

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

This morning I realized I’d forgotten a load of clothes I put in the dryer yesterday. When I dug them out, I laughed as I showed Daughter #1–in that batch were exactly the same number of aprons as jeans. “There must be some sort of message there,” I said. And, as it turns out, there was.

I’ve always been a big fan of aprons. I’m a messy cook, but my large family demanded regular meals, so I’ve worn out many aprons over the years.  In fact, aprons are so regularly a part of my everyday attire that more than once I’ve shown up at the doctor’s office or a school board meeting and realized I was still wearing the one I’d put on to fix breakfast or do the dishes. (I remember to unobtrusively slip it off before I go in. Mostly.)

I learned to love aprons from my mother and grandmothers, and I have inherited several of theirs. Especially at Christmas, I think of my dad’s mother wearing a worn apron most of every day. Her job as bread maker on the farm began when she was twelve years old and was assigned to provide bread three times a week for family and farmhands. Twenty-two loaves at a time. By the time I was born, her fingers were already curling slightly with arthritis at the joints, but the bread that was served on her table—warm and slathered with butter and pomegranate jelly–is still the standard for every slice I’ve ever eaten since.

When my own grandchildren cook with me, they automatically pull aprons off the hooks behind the kitchen door. We have a couple of sizes–even three miniature ones which fit four-year-olds very nicely. This week, we are making pies, fancy breads, and cookies as part of our traditions for the holiday, so every apron in the laundry is covered with streaks of flour, pie filling, and frosting.

There’s something about wearing an apron that unites us beyond our cultural, geographic, economic, even political boundaries. Yesterday as I doubled the strings on my apron so that I could tie it securely around my waist, I glanced at the Christmas decorations in the room surrounding me and wondered if another mother two thousand years ago had been wearing an apron when she blew gently on a wooden spoon till its contents cooled enough to taste for seasonings just as I did at that moment while preparing dinner? Maybe she had hoped, like I often do, that her boy and his friends might drop by to share a meal with her?

Surely, once he’s become a man, she knows her son has much to do—assignments from his father eons in the making. Long weeks, then months pass by. One unexpected day, perhaps it is a neighbor who calls out a warning, “Come now! Your son. Your boy.” Without a moment’s hesitation, she rips off her apron as she runs, every step propelled by dread.

She makes her way beyond the city to a field where a large and threatening crowd has gathered, guards shoving people back away from the cruel execution’s ground—both the jeering mob and the followers of faith waiting for the death of three convicted enemies of the state. In horror, she watches, helpless, hour upon hour, as her son is lost to her, his agony a nightmare which no mother should ever have to know.

I wonder if she might have had an inkling of what would come on that night so many years before when she had laid her perfect baby in a manger and marveled as the very angels in the heavens shouted out for joy? Or did a momentary chill pass by, then disappear as her baby suckled gently at her breast? Did she understand the star shining in the night would lead inexorably to that Long Dark Day?

Unconsciously, I wipe my sticky fingers on my apron, shake my head, and draw back to tasks at hand. When dinner’s done, the table’s cleared, the dishes washed and put away, I loosen up my apron strings and hang my old, worn friend next to its fellows on a hook.

As did that mother of millennia long past, I, too, know what it means to grieve a son. I’ve found great comfort in the words that her Son taught. His sacrifice unsealed a light beyond the door of death, and every mother’s child, once lost, is waiting on the other side.