Zinc Lid

Unknown

Zinc Lid

It’s the gray of canning season rain,

neither cool nor warm, and mottled

with feeble light. There’s a moony

milk-glass insert ringed by rubber

and a dent where somebody rapped it

to break the seal. But its cucumber

summers, dill and brine, are over.

No more green Mason jars cooling,

no generations of dust beneath

the cellar stairs, the ancient quarts

of tomatoes like balls of wax,

the pickles slowly going gray

as kidneys, pale applesauce settling

out of its syrup. Today, on a bench

in a dark garage it’s upside down,

a miniature galvanized tub adrift

on time, and in it two survivors,

a bolt that once held everything

together, season in and season out,

and a wing nut resting its wings.

Ted Kooser 

 

 

"...Two survivors."

 

The contrast between the purpose - that of storing abundance for future food, and the grayness, the reduced and dusty "survivors" of that hopeful outlook, grips me with its grimness. 

 

This has been a theme in my life, that of standing in the ruins of a once-established dream - a house or a garden or a person - and being asked to work with the things that remain.

 

 

And the things that remain?

 

 

In Kooser's poem, I see hope.

Two survivors.

Not much, but having lived and re-lived this particular, I understand that this is all that's needed.

 

 

"Season in and season out..." 

There is something (or someOne) who holds everything together.

And because of Him the future is stored with abundance and fullness and life.  

 

 

I rest in the shadow of His wings.