The weekend arrives with a schedule of household tasks that never ceases. There is laundry, and cleaning, and tidying, and the procuring of groceries. Depending on the season, there could be shoveling the walk or mowing the lawn. A thousand tasks randomly volunteer and all of them combined amount to the bare minimum of life’s essential needs.
And as much as these tasks seem mindless, I tend to think about them all the time.
Or half the time, since I often get distracted midway through by the intersection of other chores.
The drier door ajar; a broom left out near a pile of nature’s glitter tracked in on the shoes, left catawampus in the foyer; dishes, all clean and in analogous piles on the counter, are waiting to be lifted into their dwelling places in the cabinets above. The grass has grown gangly around the edges.
Our halfway house. Everything is halfway finished.
Not just in tasks, but in its structure as well.
As I carry a basket of laundry into the bedroom, I catch sight of ancient blue painter’s tape curling from the edge of window trim as if for the first time … and not every morning since we moved here sixteen years ago.
One of these days, I tell myself, I will peel that off. Then I just half smile, knowing that this is a conversation I’ve had with myself before. I, of course, bargain in response that as soon as the tape is dislodged, the wall will need to be repainted and the moulding retaped.
I like the smell of the things I am folding, fresh from the dryer and still warm. It signals emphatically that they are clean. I had selected the hamper over another, one I had washed and dried days ago, because I didn’t want to face all the wrinkles that would have unfurled.
Those duds would need another ride through the tumble, this time under the fancy “steam setting” I rarely remember is an option. Or not. The menfolk, whose clothes I am laundering, are perfectly capable of using an iron if they should be bothered by the idea of walking around in the world looking like an unmade bed.
When I go back for the next load, I notice the perfect footprints of a size-13 shoe on the still-drying floorboards. The map they make starts in the entryway and leads through the right side of the dining room into the kitchen, where they turn in front of the refrigerator and traipse back through the house on the left side.
For some reason that evades me, I do not become irate. Perhaps the tracks reminded me of a different kind of sadness, the kind of footprints the dog stopped making last summer when she left us. I could dwell in that sadness forever, but I won’t. The mop is still standing in a full bucket, waiting for me to wring it out, douse the weeds with our work product, and call it a day.
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