The Towel I Kept for Orva

Eleven Words

The proposal that cost me seven weeks of Orva’s friendship had been sitting on the board’s table since June.

A mother in our congregation, Brenna Gunnarson, whose little girl Tess is in the third grade, had come to us at Pentecost with a simple request. Tess has celiac disease. For four years she had been taking a rice wafer from a separate dish, carried to the back pew by an usher, a half minute after everyone else. Brenna was not angry. She asked whether it would be possible for the whole church to take the same thing at the same moment. We had two other members, an older couple, in the same position. The board tabled it three times, because we are a board and that is what we do.

I would have let it sit until Christmas if I had not walked into that kitchen on the fifth of September. That Saturday night I could not sleep. I lay beside my wife, Carla, and ran it from every angle. I could not tell Orva to stop. If I said, Orva, I think you should stop baking, she would say, I am fine, Dirk. I would say, I saw your arm. And I would be the man who broke a promise at a sink. I could not tell the board, because I had given my word. And I could not simply wait, because the next thing that happened in that kitchen would not be a burn on the forearm.

I could not take it to the board either. If I had to explain it in the fellowship hall with the whole room looking at her, then the reason became her arm. The reason became the poor old woman who burned herself. The church would learn why. She would be pitied for the rest of her life in a building where she had never once asked for anything. I have known Orva Ketterling since I was ten years old. You cannot talk her out of a thing out of kindness. She has been outlasting kindness since 1974.

But a woman can fight a cruel sentence. She can be angry at it. She can put it down and walk to her car with her head up and her back straight, and nobody will ask her to explain why she stopped. All that anger would give her somewhere to stand.

I asked Pastor Ellen to put the item on the fifteenth and to invite Orva as a courtesy, so that she would hear it from the board and not from the coffee counter. I did not tell the pastor about the arm.

On Tuesday, the fifteenth, at seven in the evening, Orva sat down at the end of the table in her good cardigan. She had pressed it. She had her hands folded on top of her purse, and when I came in she smiled at me, and I will tell you it nearly undid the whole plan.