Cleaning for my grandmother
stern as death is love, relentless as a hoover is devotion
Vacuuming is so miserable, animals run from it.
Or, if you’re like my friend’s Corgi, aggressively run toward it, barking and snapping.
But, living most of my adult life in apartments or Catholic Worker houses with brooms and mops, and where vacuums are scarce (and unnecessary on uncarpeted floors), I have realized vacuuming is pretty goddamn effective.
Vacuuming the stairs, I thought of how much I loved my grandmother. I had never vacuumed her stairs before. I think because Grandma’s house is just a place you show up and receive. You receive magic, birds, New Yorker clippings, books and affection. You make paneer together. You listen to memories of Willie Wong’s flophouse across the border from Texas, before any inkling of a wall or terrible-toothed concertina wire floating in the Rio Grande was there. You don’t have to do anything or contribute anything. You show up and receive. You soak it all up like a sponge to spill it out wherever you go. It’s your family. It’s your heritage, the culture you swim in.
Slowly, being here, I have felt that begin to change. Children are passive recipients and adults are agents. And so here I am, and here her house is and she is not here. So I have to take care of it.
This weekend, a plumber quizzed me on the inner workings of the houses’s well water inflow and outflow valves. And I shrugged politely while making vague conciliatory noises of noncommittal curiosity, but inside I asked him: How well do you know your grandmother’s plumbing?
He is a plumber, after all, so I suppose he may have known it quite well by the end: just as I learned my grandmother’s opinions on Thomas Merton and Karl Barth.
But the love I have for her and the gratitude for all the love and everything she has given me—a whole bright world outside the windows—just flows out of me. So I care for the house as best as I can, even though it’s not mine. Which is a difficult feeling. You really can only exist inside of it like a shrine, letting everything sit, waiting. But I clean it because I love it, because I love her.
One afternoon, my eyesight is strained from staring at screens and books and at the road ahead of me too much. And not enough into the eyes of others.
So I walk out into the gloaming and three white-tailed deer saunter across the driveway and into the woods, leaping in little musical phrases down the hill and deeper into the rapidly vanishing woods.
Animals inside draw you further into yourself: pets are a strange invention. I read online that a housecat remains in a stage of unnatural, elongated dependency on their owner rather than coming into full, mature cathood with a territory to prowl and manage on their own. I wonder if that’s true, and if it is, I feel bad. We are all beings made for freedom—even housecats. But I think taming comes from less a place of domination than rather an unfortunate side effect of our own limitation. Humans—despite their instinct for control in an untethered world—seem eager to have a household herd made up of more than just humans: maybe we realize, instinctively, no creature (or species) is an island. That we need one another and belong to one another.
To look outside for companionship: to the cardinals in the branches of the shrub, to the deer prancing oh so gently through the pine trees, these are practice in being creaturely. To be a part of the great miracle God is making, the work of our hands and minds and hearts are just one part of—like that cardinal shaking off his feathers in the rain or that squirrel building her nest. There goes that hawk again—what is she looking for here?
On a later afternoon, the deer come back, six of them now, and graze through the backyard. A young buck with the beginnings of his fine rack of antlers picks up the bird food I spilled below the feeder when filling it carelessly. I take several photos before I put the camera down and just look at him. He looks at me. He is young enough to be unafraid: I’m just a two-legged creature in a glass cage.
All day long, I live in the shadow of her going hence. It seems wrong to sit on the front porch and to think: I will open that door and go inside and she will not be here.
We are made of work that we have once heard, truths that struck us deeply in their beauty, phrases and stories we soaked up. Humans aren’t marble sculptures, we’re patchwork quilts, constantly being patched and pieced together.
I am made of her and here.
Vacuuming the stairs, I feel like this was the moment my grandmother was preparing for me all along. For this. For finally cleaning a place I had never cleaned before. Sometimes, I wonder if she knew.
Most days, her absence seems impermanent. It seems like she has gone away for a trip and will be coming back shortly while I look after the house. And in a way that is so, except that she who is at home, and it is I who am still doing the journeying.