The old woman had done it for years. Some people shook their heads if they happened on her small house on the edge of town. Why spend money on bird food when it was obvious it could be spent more wisely? She clearly didn’t have the resources to paint her house’s weathered boards, yet she spent what little she had on flowers in the springtime and birdseed (birdseed!) in the winter. Foolish woman!

She rightly guessed what they thought. They wrongly guessed her character.

The porch curtain fluttered closed as she stepped back from watching the latest townsperson walk by and sat down in her wicker rocker to think.

She’d lived over sixty years in this very house. It was a lovely shade of green then – green with a hint of gray, like the soft leaf of lamb’s ear that grew near the back step. It had shutters, too; shutters of a deeper green like the algae that grew in the pond every spring a mile down the road. In those days the little house burst with sweet scents of cookies and the savory aroma of slow-cooked barbeque or her favorite, peppery catfish. Laughter was common and prayer was as natural as breathing.

But life brings both good and hard, and financial hardship followed the loss of health, and death followed that. And she was suddenly alone and older than she had realized. Somewhere along the way she had to set priorities. Hers were not everyone’s, but she didn’t want others’ priorities. She wanted hers.

Even in the old days flowers had delighted her and birds seemed to be little messengers of joy. And in the days in which new silence seemed echoing and eating seemed a bother, they had kept her from wanting to die, herself. They had been loyal to her, so now she was loyal to them. That was the why. It was the why of her choices the townspeople didn’t know.

She admitted to herself, though, that she wished for the color of the old days. She wished for the lovely shades of green. Yet even if she could afford the paint, she wouldn’t have been able to manage the task. But she still had prayer. She would have prayer as long as she breathed, so that was a good thing. God made things beautiful in their time and sometimes out of their time, too, she mused. But asking for a painted house? It was a small thing in comparison to the big things needed in this world, and it seemed an unnecessary, trivial prayer. God knew her needs and He always met them. No – she would make beauty where beauty could be found.

She walked outside and gathered some branches to put in a floor vase in her living room, then hung on them ornaments and paper star garland. Picking up her Bible from the end table, she read the Christmas story as she did every Christmas Eve. Tomorrow she would treat herself to cranberry juice with her potato soup! She cracked a smile.

A glance out the window into the darkening night told her a storm was howling through.

Christmas morning dawned bright and crisp. Sunlight sparkled through crystalline coatings on the tree branches. Wondering how the birds had fared through the storm, she pulled on a warm coat, hat, and gloves and took her small bucket of birdseed outside. She threw a handful to her right and to her left, then turned to make her way back inside.

And that’s when she saw it: Her house wore a lovely shade of green with a hint of gray. And shutters! Yes, shutters the color of spring algae! (How long had it been? At least since the storm of ’09 had blown them off.) Little chirps roused her from her gaze. And something else, too. The savory aroma of peppery catfish. 

Matthew 6:26 Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ; Image: pexels-patrick-19363951-scaled.jpg; pexels-photo-531499.jpeg; pexels-kevin-quarshie-14715265.jpg petrin-express-Sn653QVfNoQ-unsplash.jpg ;rolf-schmidbauer-qvV24TOon4Q-unsplash.jpg