A Fiction Prose Reflection, Book X of XI

byChrisWhite – 2025

On the Series:
This series weaves together the eleven cardinal virtues: Hope, Charity, Prudence, Kindness, Faith, Love, Temperance, Fortitude, Wisdom, Patience, and Justice, through a synthesis of literary prose and poetry. Each reflection reaches into the marrow of human experience, drawing on both original verse and timeless lines from poets who gave voice to the sacred. The tenth installment turns to Patience. Patience isn’t just a virtue, it’s a tempo. A breath. A posture toward time. To write about Patience we must match its rhyme, its quiet gravity, its refusal to be rushed or loud. If Wisdom is the voice that speaks last, then Patience is the silence that holds the room open for it to speak. Patience thrives in a space where nature, time, and stillness intersect.

Her name is Thelma Lou Garrison, and she has lived on the same cracked corner of Elm Street in Chattanooga for ninety years. Her house aches and moans like an old woman who’s learned to rest on one hip, roof patched with old tin and prayers, porch sagging but dependable, just like her. She was born there. Delivered her youngest there. Buried her husband, her sisters, and her oldest son, and yet stayed.

Folks say she never missed a day of church, which is true, if what you call church is the neighborhood, the porch stoop and the swing set, the five blocks around her shotgun house where kids still knock and holler and ask if Miss Thelma can come out to play.

She does not scold. She does not preach. She stirs. She listens. She waits.

And in this waiting, something holy happens.

She tells the little ones, the wild ones, the in-between ones:

“Sugar, some things take longer to bloom.
You don’t pull on a green tomato.
You wait. You tend. You hush to listen.”

She calls it tending. But what she’s really doing is planting a patience most of them won’t recognize until years later, when they’re standing in some hard place, wondering why they didn’t come apart. And maybe they’ll remember Miss Thelma, how she sat with them when their mama was crying too much to answer the door. How she let them crack eggs in her kitchen, even when half the shell went in. How she didn’t flinch when they cussed or stuttered or lied.

She waited. Not for them to change, but for them to feel safe enough to try.

“I used to mistake stillness for surrender.
But now I know it’s a kind of labor.
To wait, without rotting.
To ache, without fleeing.”
— Chris White, “The Slow Work of Rain”

She keeps a coffee can of buttons on her window ledge. Old ones, fat ones, shiny, cracked, wooden, mother-of-pearl. When a child gets fidgety, she hands them the can and says, “Find the ones that match.” They never do. But they sit longer. Their breath slows. The world softens.

Miss Thelma doesn’t have many stories about herself. She lets you talk. And sometimes she’ll nod so slow it feels like a season turning. But if you wait long enough, she might say something like:

“Patience ain’t sitting still. It’s carrying water without spilling it when your knees are shaking.”

“I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker…”
— T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

On Saturdays, she paints the sidewalk cracks with a brush dipped in soapy water, a ritual no one really understands. When asked why, she once said:

“So the ants know where to cross.”

She tends the invisible. And that’s the surprise of it. The world keeps its gaze on spectacle. Miss Thelma plants hers on the unseen.

Patience, for her, is not resignation, it is participation in time. She does not wait because she has no choice. She waits because she knows how; she knows why.

When the new developers offered to buy her home “as is,” with language dressed up in gold, she smiled kindly and said,
“This place belongs to God and children. And He ain’t sellin’.”

“small pond after rain—
the water does not complain
about waiting there”
— Chris White

This is the Virtue of Patience.

It doesn’t shout.
It doesn’t chase.
It grows, without asking permission.

It holds the egg while it hatches.
It stays in the pew even when the music stops.
It watches over sidewalks and wild things
and broken children who don’t yet know they’re whole.

And if you’re ever in Chattanooga, down past the storefronts turned soul-food spots, near where the kudzu climbs the chain link like it’s reaching for something that looks like light, you might see her.

On the porch.

Button can in her lap.
Looking at nothing.
Which is how you know she’s seeing everything.