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Excerpted Inspirations #190

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • Aug 6
  • 0 min read
There were no other Friends in the town where Henry’s father had taken his young bride, so she had no Meeting to go to. But sometimes she and little Henry had Meeting by themselves. Once in a while of a winter afternoon, before the stove (his parents were poor as well as young and had only a stove, not a furnace), once in a while in summer, out in the side yard under the very old oak tree that overhung the tiny cottage, Henry’s mother would say, “What do you say we have Meeting?” Henry liked Meeting pretty well, though there wasn’t much to it. All you did was just to sit quiet. Sometimes when he was still very small, he sat in his mother’s lap. Sometimes he sat beside her and held her hand. She let him do whatever he felt like doing, so long as he was quiet. Sometimes, when they had Meeting out-of-doors, he slid down and lay on his back on the ground, looking up into the strong, crooked, rough branches of the old oak tree, and through them at the blue, blue sky. Once or twice he dozed off into a nap. Once or twice his mother prayed. Always the same prayer, “God please make my little boy strong and good.” The first time, “What is ‘God’?” he asked her curiously, but shyly, for a string inside him had been softly plucked by the sound of her voice when she said the word. She answered him, “When a little boy wants to do what’s right, that’s God in his heart.” But mostly there was no talk at all. Just a stillness, and Mother’s face so quiet and calm that it made Henry feel quiet and calm to look at it. -Dorothy Canfield, “The Forgotten Mother,” in A Harvest of Stories (1951), pp. 94-95

 
 
 

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