Mary

“These feet; thick and ordinary,” I whispered under my breath; a softness that only I could hear as my words ricocheted off the floor and returned to me. But there wasn’t anything ordinary about him; he was an enigma, a mystery. I have few words…unlike her.

With the clay pot’s lid set aside the aroma curled into my nose; sweeter than honeysuckle. A merchant whom I’d never known peddled the ointment surrounded by others selling pomegranates and figs and cakes of raisins.

I was compelled to buy it; not by the merchant, not by any person, but by him. Yet he never mentioned it to me. My brother knew him well. He cried once.

A puff of my breath erased the dust lying on the hairs across the toes. I cupped a heal in my hand as though I was holding flesh of gold. “Who am I to do this,” I whispered to myself again without raising my head. The conversations continued, but I heard nothing.

Braised lamb hung in the air and mingled with good wine.

I had smelled the ointment as a child; I was just 6 or 7 years old. My mother had once possessed a far smaller pot of it. My father had purchased it from a marauding merchant; a gift of love for his wife; my mother. The man swore that the spice had come from mountains whose peaks poked above the clouds; a place where few go.

A fantastical story; a pink flower crushed, amber oil, acquired at the hands of Egyptian traders.

“What might they say,” I purred faintly as a dozen looked on. My brother laughed before he saw me stoop, then grew sullen. He understood my offering.

It’s a pound; supple, smooth, thick like scooping honey from the hive.

My eyes brightened at the smell; my dark skin tingled, hairs on my neck stood like sentries at the Temple entrance. My heart beat and my chest heaved. My touch caused him no alarm.

Yet a pair of eyes fixed upon me with disdain; evil eyes.

I was fearful my hair would get in the way as it cascaded over my shoulders; strands caught themselves in my eyelashes already watered. My chest rose and fell like the tide as I discovered it difficult to breathe.

The room fell silent.

I remember my own mother using the ointment; her skin pristine, her feet like milk. My heart lightened at the thought of my mother. She was a beautiful woman; hair of velvet, eyes as green as ripe olives, a voice as tender as growing grass in spring.

Ointment oozed through my fingers as I caressed his callouses; it dripped like thick rain, I caught it and returned it to his ankle.

My fear fled as the room was wrapped in invisible aromatic splendor. Not everyone was pleased. But he was; that’s all that mattered, he was.

She slowed her activity to look on; he had changed her too. Once loud, once busy, once annoying, once proud—now humble.

My mother would have relished being here today had she been alive. She knew of the Promise to come; she looked forward to this day. But it was me tasked with the ointment; pure nard; a task that ushered from heaven.

His foot was heavy; a man’s foot. It was a foot that has shuffled along dusty paths, tread up mountainsides, kissed by the waves on the shoreline, and bruised by planks.

What I thought a nuisance became my towel; after bathing his feet with the ointment I dried them with my hair. In one brief moment our eyes met, his smile warm; warm like fresh bread from the hearth. Lazarus looked on; Martha smiled too.

“Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor,” the thief said.

My lips met the curve of his foot before I raised my head; my work complete.

“Leave her alone,” dripped from his lips as his eyes drifted to the future. “The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

I strode away silent, content, without looking back.