Cleaning Straight Into My Past

A friend is coming to stay and suddenly I am seeing my condo through her eyes: the stacks of books, the bits of half-lists strewn about, the khaki pants folded on top of the small cupboard in the bedroom which have been waiting over a week to go to the sewing lady. There are splotches of milk on the top fridge shelf that have been there since the last gallon container I bought had a leak in the bottom of it.

And once I start seeing, I can’t stop. I’m essentially neat, not a terrible housekeeper, but not great, either. Not with the fine points like refrigerator shelves or cupboard drawers. Accumulation creeps up on me like pounds in winter and I fail to notice.

“The practice of paying attention really does take time,” Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her book, Altar In The World. “Most of us move so quickly that our surroundings become no more than blurred scenery we fly past on our way to somewhere else”

I would add to this that our homes, which we are either leaving in a hurry or in which we are hastily preparing food or crashing in exhaustion, tend also to receive the same blurred sweep of attention as the trees we pass on our way to the store.

Seeing does takes time and anticipating the arrival of my guest, I have begun really seeing my apartment. It moves me to action.

Books would inhabit my space entirely if it weren’t for the available bins at Pequot library. I remove stacks of books I have read from the bookcase shelf and take off, carrying weighty bags  toward their next incarnation.

My cleaning person does a good job except for the pictures hanging on the walls. And there are lots: watercolors—my brother’s and my daughter’s work--and others: oils and acrylics from another life of mine, and framed family photos, which I walk by constantly and do not see.

My brother's work: Brandon Stoddard

Armed with a feather duster for the oils and some “green” form of Windex plus a roll of paper towels, I begin. As I clear and shine surfaces the pictures beneath come alive and I am seeing them, remembering when each was taken: my two sons laughing and hugging each other at my youngest son’s wedding, my mother’s engagement picture; so pretty, she was. I wipe the glass with the dampened paper towel, watching as her face becomes more defined. Who were you, then, Mom? What were your dreams? I wonder.

A photograph of me taken by my brother, sitting on the front steps of our farm with my sons behind me, hangs in the hallway. I am laughing wildly because the boys with their long legs have squeezed me between their knees and are wickedly pressing against my torso. The shower at the farm that weekend had been a bit dodgy so I had not washed my hair. It looks really dreadful. But my brother  had framed the picture and sent it and because it was such a funny moment, bad hair notwithstanding, I have kept it all these years. As I shine the covering glass I start to laugh again, remembering.

On it goes, every picture awakening as I clean a glass surface or brush bumpy paint with the duster. Each one, paintings as well as photographs, has a place in a particular time in my life. Two grandsons playing in a sandbox who now have jobs and support themselves  in apartments in New York. An Aboriginal painting I brought home from Australia, the Native American pots brought home from Aspen in the ‘70s; the pictures now on these walls that have come to America recently from my cottage in Cornwall, England, that I sold last summer. I move slowly over them seeing with my mind’s eye where they were in the cottage and feeling grateful for the memories they inspire.

“Reverence requires a certain pace,” Barbara Brown Taylor tells us. And I know exactly what she means. As I continue the work, I  move slowly through different stages and places and times in my life, cleaning, shining and honoring them. I find myself filled with the mystery of my years, the places I have been and lived and the people I have loved and continue to love.

 I am on a roll now. There is no stopping this odyssey into my past. By the time I have wiped clean all the objects from the shelves of the hutch in the living room: Mom’s painted Victorian china clock and candle sticks, her porcelain compote with the delicate flowers and plump cherubs adorning it, the McCoy vases I bought myself on an adventure into Ebay, and the masterfully carved wooden birds from the Cornwall house, I am in “the zone:” a gentle and blissful meditative state of oneness and completeness with the wholeness of my life.

That evening, as I sit to watch TV, I smile at the sparkling family pictures in their gleaming frames. I have connected with each one and carefully replaced them on the long shelves of the bookcase.

 I am happy.