And we talk and we talk,
and none of it seems like work,
only movement toward something
more ordered, more sensible,
something more genuine.

By LORI HALL STEELE
      When my mother leaves, it’s as if Tinkerbell has sprinkled fairy dust here and there through my house. The toaster sparkles, dog hair has disappeared, and glass shines.
      Cleaning is in her blood. As we sip coffee in the kitchen, she’s running water, putting plates away, offhandedly wiping the enamel-top table, as she chats about the day — your aunt called and we should take a yoga class and, what did the baby say today? — and it all meshes together, one fluent action. Cleaning is unpremeditated, an instinct like turning your head toward laughter.
      It also is an answer: When she arrives and sees a flu or frustration, the droop of routine weariness, she says, “Let’s clean.” Or she just does it. It’s not a dramatic act, it is something that logically follows.
      The broom begins its Zen motions, dishwater runs into porcelain, tangles of laundry turn into neat, comprehensible shapes, and we talk as we move through the pure motions of housework. And we talk and we talk, and none of it seems like work, only movement toward something more ordered, more sensible, something more genuine under all the inevitable accumulations, the dusts and footsteps of everyday life.
      When she leaves, a little part of the world is in order, if only for a moment.
      This is a gift I have not always fully comprehended. As a teenager, I actually was aghast at my mother’s love of housekeeping, and this phase wasn’t merely an adolescent rebellion. This happened during those transformative years between Betty Crocker and Martha Stewart, when my little-girl ears heard volumes about gender roles, and the voices said: Housework? You must be joking.
      Meanwhile, my mother sang Carly Simon songs as she ironed linen tablecloths, watered Boston ferns and dusted picture frames, and the world felt warm and kept, but the voices continued. They said: Housework? Definitely Not Sexy. Rather, housework was a string of long, gloomy words with hard souls, like “dehumanizing.” It was a time when the metaphors of order became metaphors of control, when a mop meant subjugation, not purification.
      I could see my mother there, scrubbing a floor, and though she sometimes looked hurried, she never looked repressed. Maybe she hadn’t heard? But I had, and to this day am conflicted by beach sand on the floor, gummy handprints on the refrigerator and toothpaste in the sink.
      Now, when I see my mother’s ease with cleaning, I envy her. I really do. She has not questioned the instinct to dust her world. Wheareas I— when I find myself longing to put on Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” and spend an afternoon polishing silver and shaking rugs and using bleach — hear some very tiny, awfully vocal part of myself clear its throat and ask: “Um, what are you doing?” Like I’ve betrayed the sisterhood.
      But a dirty home is not a sexy home. A messy room isn’t empowering. So I do it anyway, and I thank god for feng shui. Also, Martha Stewart. Together, they’ve dressed up homemaking as something alternately exotic and mystical, upscale and imbued with the stellar lineage of All Our Grandmothers. It has helped return honor to the simple, beautiful act of nurturing our homes. Hallelujah.
      Because I love my silver, and polishing it is a joy. It was my grandmother’s, and as I rub each tine, it summons a genie, a childhood memory of running down a sun-bright hallway toward a holiday table, a grownup memory of a winter night and candlelight and a joke told with a French accent.
      And I love my house, even with all its broken parts, and somehow, when it is clean, when the things are in their places and the surfaces touched and tended, I sometimes feel like dancing, there on the scrubbed floors. My voice says: This is liberation.
      There is something a little holy in taking care of the places we inhabit, in summoning sheen. And there is a power in watching over our spaces, the rooms we move within, the sets where our life’s stories unfold.
      My mother knows this, and that is why, when a baby is born, or one of her children’s hearts is breaking, or a someone’s blue simply because the sky is as flat and gray as a tarp, she comes over. She comes over and she turns on a vacuum, wipes handprints off a door, or sprinkles Comet in a sink, all the while chatting — your uncle called and how do you make apple crisp and, I can’t believe how much I love that baby — until it all melds together into one fluid movement, and the world is just a little more in order, if only for a moment.

Published in Northern HOME