The Hired Girl

by Laura Amy Schlitz

But I think the most important thing those books gave me was a kind of faith. My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workaday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that. Maybe not here at Steeple Farm, but somewhere. It has to be. It has to be.

But even the Thomashefsky cat likes to be told how handsome he is — you can tell by the way he purrs and flexes his paws — and I sometimes wonder if every living thing doesn’t need kind words as much as sunshine and water.

Malka told me he was singing from the Proverbs of Solomon, all about the worth of a good woman. It’s a Jewish custom for a man to praise his wife for all the work she does for Shabbos. I thought it was splendid for a husband to praise his wife every single week,

There’s something very fine and disinterested in being good when there’s nothing to be gotten out of it.

the absence of God, at that moment, was the presence of God. I felt it and it was true. It wasn’t what I’d prayed for. It didn’t answer my questions. It wasn’t forgiveness or chastisement or permission. It was just — He was just — God was just — real to me. There was darkness, and the darkness was God. There was absence, and the absence was God. There was my longing, and my longing was God. God wasn’t there, and at the same time I was more certain of Him than I’ve ever been in my life.

I think I would rather have a cat than a sweetheart, after all. They are less trouble, and even the handsomest sweetheart is sadly lacking in fur.

When I behold the ocean, I know that the world isn’t just the grind of small tasks and small thoughts. The world is wide and wild and grand. Someday I will sail my little bark into the great ocean of life, braving the winds and the tide. And while the waves may dwarf me, they will not belittle me, because I will be the master of my fate and the captain of my soul.