Housekeeping

Reading glasses swinging back and forth, dangling from a drug store string slung around my neck I said, to myself of course, I never want to wear this kind of thing. But now I do, sometimes. I like the idea of relaxing, being a comfortable woman of the home, swinging open the door in a batik housedress, casually welcoming someone in, pets or as the French say, animals for company, something like that. As if pets had no other reason to be. Years of watching women folding, unfolding, refolding socks, sheets, dinner napkins, a lot happens in those moments of freshly laundered piles heaped onto the sofa, better the dining room table as long as it’s clean of course. My grandparents hung it all out in the sun, flopping away without a care, ironing sheets was necessary. When my paternal grandmother died, the very night she passed over the clothesline, into the black heavens sprinkled with sequins of silver, she came to me in a dream. I stood at a table folding clothes, I became aware that there was someone next to me folding as well. I first recognized her hands, red and wrinklie, with age spots. “Nanny?” I didn’t look toward her; she said in her most comforting southern way, “Don’t be afraid.” Then I turned toward the left looking up, up, up, and there she was all in white, a long crisp gown, fresh and smiling. “I love you.” She’d spoke. Then she was gone.

All the years of tucking my family’s socks into little balls, checking that stains from homemade baby food I’d pureed had come out of small cotton onesies with tiny bunnies or kittens, animals for company, it made sense. In what now is the sublime, separating socks and time; when squabbles were over who goes first, or if my husband, or uncle, made the turkey or if we should just call it off; a time when potty training toddlers, house training doggies, trying to read a poem in a magazine, or take a coffee in the sun turned like the minute hand on the clock. To steal a moment of memories of everyone, of how it should be now, could have been then, what regrets were tossed in amongst the years, folding, unfolding. For a pause, a place within one single minute a sense of calmness, falls over me; the windows need washing and there’s a time for that.