A chance remark by a friend reminded me of the butcher's shop. I used to go there often, back when it was on my way to the kid's babysitter. But the kid hasn't been babysat for quite a while now and the shop is well out of my normal ambit. It still has the best ground beef in town, I still like the place and the people who run it, but I don't stop by there from one year's end to another's.

Still, it had been mentioned; and the shop is on the way back from the dump, and today was a dump-run day, so I stopped by the shop for some hamburger and (as it turned out) some homemade breakfast sausage. And there they were in the shining clean display counter: two bags of fairly meaty beef neck and shank bones, about 10 pounds, all for a couple of dollars, begging to be made into stock. So I got those too. Who could resist?

I thought, as I put the bones into the oven to roast for a while (the secret to good beef stock): I can't remember the last time I did this. It came back to me a little later, as I transferred the bones and pan drippings to the big stock pot: the last time I did this was seven years ago, just before all hell broke loose. I made a lot of beef stock that fall, I remembered. After that, I stopped--I don't know why.

"Mother said there's be years like this, but she didn't say how many…." There are some periods that feel like a whole succession of fractures: ruptured relationships, hurts and betrayals, losses and defeats coming fast and thick, until it feels like life is pounding you into applesauce and you ask yourself what wrong you did, or how bad a person you must be, for things to go so terribly awry. Doesn't happen to everyone, but it does happen to many. The world comes crashing down around your ears, breaking your bones (it feels), smashing you down. You feel abandoned by man and God, left in fragments and bereft.

It happens. And then, when the worst is over, you may say to yourself, well, lying here in pieces isn't going to get the laundry folded. So you pick yourself up, give yourself a couple of good shakes, and get on with the business of living, because that's the way it has to be. Maybe Job could take time to huddle moaning in the ashes, nursing his boils and wailing to his friends, but the rest of us have bills to pay and deadlines to meet. So we do that. Sometimes the fractures still ache like crazy, but you get used to living with them. Time may or may not heal all wounds, but certainly with time the wounds stop being so fresh and shocking. Time makes most things--perhaps all things--bearable.

That's what had happened. I'd taken time away from the places where hurts had happened, moved on, and accepted that the past was closed. If your landscape has been so thoroughly trashed that you can't live there anymore, it's time to move on. You should peacefully abandon what you can't expect to see mended, handing it over to God, turning your back on it, and just walking on. Or at least, that's what everyone tells you.

So you walk on. But it's funny how, years later, sometimes you come up over the crest of the hill and there it is before you, that valley full of wreckage that you'd thought you'd never set eyes on again. You thought you' d forgotten the landscape, but you find you remember it all: every square foot, every stone, the empty creek bed, the cave in the side of the hill, how the trees used to look when there were still leaves on them. It's peaceful now, the pain all gone. The valley lies quiet and serene under a clear mild sky. Time has rotted away all that was corruptible, and what's left scattered across the valley is white, dry, innocuous. And you think to yourself: "Oh--I thought it would be so awful to be back here. But it's not so bad. This, too, I can live with."

But that's not what God has in mind. God's Spirit has that power: to draw together what was shattered and mend it, from the inside out, without the thing itself willing its own reconstruction or even knowing what the heck is going on. Bones knitting together, elegant sleek tendons slotting into their attachment points, bundles of sheathed myofibrils stacking, and the neat, strong elastic of laminar skin stretching over all, tough and protective. And then, shockingly, life gasping in where life had been and gone, apparently beyond recall. Lazarus wasn't just dead; he was starting to get soft and swollen and smelly. That's drastic.

You don't get back the same life, though. You don't regain exactly what you' d lost; you get back something transformed--something which is, at one and the same time, both what it was and altogether new--most confusing. All these years later, I find myself being handed back what I had lost, and then some: but it's different, as I am different now from the person I was then. Different but, I think, better: more complete, richer and fuller. It's all muddling and mysterious, but oddly satisfying.

I can't promise it always turns out this way; that would be pre-empting God, and besides, time might prove me a liar. But in some lives, at some times, this transforming power happens, and if it does, it's God's doing, not our own. If this happens in my life, I can't take credit. All I can do with broken bones is make soup. And I can't do even that unless the bones have a little fresh red meat on them.

Even after all these years, a person doesn't forget the basics. Tonight I'll strain out the spent bones and chill the stock. It's watery and thin now, with a layer of icky fat, which I'll peel off the top tomorrow, when it's cold and solid. If I am no god, I am a good cook, and making stock is something I do know a thing or two about. I can work a small transformation here myself, with carrots and celery, onion and bayleaves, garlic and peppercorns, and the skins of onions to give a good colour. As for the bones themselves, now repulsive beyond belief--well, my neighbours have dogs.

For right now, the scent of beginning-to-be-beef-stock fills the house, something I haven't smelled in so many years now. It smells very good. It promises Serious Soup, the food of the soul. It says that things are coming around right after all this time--renewed, transformed, redeemed.

(for JMW, with thanks to Barb)