Sugarcane fields in Brazil are actually burned before they can be harvested, and the green stalks are fire-rusted when the women start cutting with machete blades in the honey of morning. The fire sprawls and dies, washing the field clean of venomous snakes and dry leaves, but preserving the water-rich roots and stalks. So the women begin their harvest of hand: they shoulder machetes against the sweet-splintered earth, splitting the shoots with their last cries of green, and hauling the cane into tall, wet piles. The brown of their arms ripens in the sun as it clips small circles over the earth, the blade obedient to its revolving course. The women who work the sugarcane field are paid by production, not by the hour, so they will push themselves until dusk. Some will toil the field for twelve hours a day, and then return home to their other world of cooking and cradles.

i watched a documentary once of photographer Sebastiao Salgado who called these women warriors. And I see it, in his pictures. The sugarcane field is their battleground, and they wrestle for their days with the sling of steel. They struggle through thickets of brown, enemy stem. The earth is their Goliath, and they face each morning with a jaw full of resolve and a pocket full of rocks. The sugar will be visited by salt, its sister, in the narrow of their eye and the bright of their brow, as the women labor from their bones up. The hours are long in the swelling sun, and the women will suffer muscle pains, machete cuts, and scorpion encounters before the day is done. Their lungs will itch with the ash from recent smoke, their shoulder blades will ache like Atlas; nevertheless, they will fight to claim the day. And after they have claimed it, they will parcel it up and haul it home and pour it into the mouths of their children and the sweet of their sleep. And we will put it in our tea.

My mother is no stranger to sugar. She heaps it into her mornings with teaspoons, usually into inviting cups of green or black tea. Tea is my mother’s morning ritual; a portion of peace before the sun and the kids are up, and in tramples the day. If she is late putting on the kettle, she will heat her mug three or four times in the microwave before she gets around to drinking it, because she refuses to drink it if not perfectly hot. Many a time i will click open the microwave door to find Thomas Kincaid with a handle, forgotten and cold, leaving a tea-rusted rim on the glass. She will set down her cup for a litany of interruptions, which have become just a part of the ritual that she accepts.

But the one morning ritual she tries not to interrupt is her time in tribute to the morning Maker. This time does not hinge on whether or not she has styled her bangs, made the French toast, or tackled the laundry; she will sit in the hovering morning light with her tea and Bible and claim just one hour of quiet. She and the chandelier make soft silhouettes against the fifty-paned beau window (i know for a fact there are fifty panes because she cleaned and glazed them all one year for my dad’s birthday), which splinters the Oriental rug with its shadows. There are piles of chaos waiting to be sorted and disentangled, but if she can pocket this one remnant of morning for the holy, half the battle is already won.

And usually, there is quite the battle at hand. Her planner notes themselves are an inky labyrinth of lists through which she must daily navigate. We always make fun of her for those lists, scrawled out in cursive and circles and cross-outs, on yellow legal pads that she stashes behind the phone. After tea and Bible study, she will spend the rest of the day devotedly connecting those dots and wearing different hats: mother, wife, homeschooling teacher, foster parent, manager of our 150-year-old home, part-time social worker, hostess, friend. And of course she will sprinkle in sledding parties, music nights, and mother-daughter teas into the cracks for good measure.

In between mugs, she will pick up the three year old from daycare, run my sister to piano lessons, create a care package to send me at college, and throw a baby shower for a soon-to-be single mother she’s watched grow up. Then she will cook dinner, which is faithfully a family event at our house, sing the brush-your-teeth song just so, and tuck three daughters, two foster kids, and one husband into bed before the day is done.

She’s been reading a book this year called “Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life” and a peek at the margins show a bolded and heralded hand-written YES next to the sentence, “A Christian home overflows its boundaries; it is an outpost of the Kingdom of God, where the hungry are fed and the naked are clothed and there is room enough for everyone.” This echoes the idea set forth in Isaiah 54, “Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left…”. This is my mother’s philosophy of house.

“i have eight children,” she likes to say. Three daughters and five foster children, not counting the foreign exchange student from France, the pastor’s daughter from Brazil, the neighboring family who lived with us one summer, our nursing student friend, various missionaries on furlough, great uncles, college friends, and the handful of other pilgrims, kin, and folks who have added to the tent pegs.

The strain of the Brazilian women shows in their hands. Their calluses fill the white sugar sacks like sweet pillows, ton by ton, stalk by stalk. My mother’s work is not so tangibly measured, but she is no less generous. Salgado writes in his book Migrations, in preface of the faces and stories that scatter the world, “More than ever, I feel that the human race is one,” and i believe him. There is a thread of similarity that spins sameness between the tangled fields of sugar stalk and the thicket-clutter of a happy kitchen. Women wake before the rest to scuffle with the light and harness it into something they can give; they wrestle the morning for their fruit: the harvester women with their machetes, and my mother with a silver spoon.