Cleaning
[image error]White vinegar, Citrasolv, and water. This is my cleaning solution of choice, and cleaning, it turns out, is about all I'm good for these days.
There are plenty of other things I should be working on, so many tasks left undone over the last few weeks, while my heart and hands and attention have been elsewhere. I've lost a friend and also, I realize now, a clear sense of my own purpose. She needed me. I was there. How simple is that? It's been just over a week since she died, and now, of course, it's time for the rest of us to keep going. Except that I can't quite figure out where I'm headed.
I'm home again, but it's hard to focus, hard to even care much about the to-do list. Here in New Hampshire, the leaves have all fallen from the trees, and the world beyond my kitchen window looks as stark and barren as my own inner landscape. I don't want to go out to lunch with friends, or work on my book proposal, or write that speech for next week. Cleaning, however, feels wonderful. And so I dust, I vacuum, I wet-mop the floor. Things really do look good enough. But I can't stop myself. I grab a pile of soft rags -- Jack's beloved old cloud sheets from when he was ten, ripped up now and stuffed into the rag bag -- and get down on my hands and knees. The smell of vinegar and orange soothes my senses. It's a relief to do something with a visible outcome, to feel some measure of accomplishment somewhere, to transform all this love and heartbreak into a job that supports our life in the here and now. The sun pours in. The floor gleams golden. My tears flow, and the soft cloud-sheet rags wipe them away. This is work I can do without thinking, work that satisfies some deep yearning for all that is constant and familiar and necessary. Someone needs to get the crumbs out of the cracks, the smushed raspberries off the counter, the scum out of the sink. It might as well be me.
Life, death, and everything in between -- it is all such a mystery. For today perhaps it is enough just to be at ease with things as they are. Perhaps it is simply time to cry and clean the house.
