Cleansing & Love for the New Year
What is cleaning but love, for what is love if it isn’t a commitment to repetition, to finding the ever-smaller bits of something or someone, to rooting out their infinite fractal possibilities and paying attention to each one?
That’s what waking up early, on safari or to go birding, or for any other nature reason, feels like to me. You wake up early because it’s a little bit painful and because that’s when the animals are getting up and also because that’s how the day presents itself in its openness, its faceted gorgeousness, from the dung beetle and exhausted lioness of Africa to the egrets fishing for their breakfast in Maryland; nothing is set yet, at dawn. It’s all mutable, muted in sound, muted in the soft, downy light floating across land and water and animals alike.
It’s a cleanser of a sort, particularly if you’re coming from the kind of schedule where electronic things regularly buzz at you.
Commonly, in my daily life in Washington, D.C., I service my technology: I refresh my Twitter feed, and my several email feeds. My phone springs to life at my approach, as does my car, and I shower them with the attention they require: energy, and also care and attention.
This one needs an update. That one’s password has mysteriously gone missing. Another is rumored to be giving information to third parties and needs to be investigated. And on and on.
There’s love there, of a kind. Repetition, certainly, and a kind of constant care.
And yet, it’s hard to go very deep. Why is it so hard to fall in love — truly in love — with your phone or an app or your email? They are with you every day. Many of us spend many hours on their care and feeding. And yet.
I was once a housekeeper for the athletes in the Olympic Village. This was in Atlanta, Georgia, back in 1996. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but it didn’t seem to matter — it was a temp position, hired through a big agency, and people regularly got hired, went on benders, didn’t show up, got fired, and got hired again, all within the course of the couple of months that the Village was built, occupied, and torn down again.
Despite the chaos, there were a few women who knew what they were doing: professional housekeepers, mostly from Jamaica. I always tried to get on one of their teams — I was impressed by them, but also a little intimidated.
I lied to one of my Jamaican coworkers once, telling her I knew how to make hospital corners on a bed when I didn’t. I lied because I knew how to make a bed for pity damn’s sake and how weird can hospital corners be? And she made me unmake the whole bed and start again in front of everyone — not in a mean way, but I’ll never forget how to make hospital corners, nor will I ever claim to be able to do something that I can’t do again.
Another day, I cleaned a bathroom, and I knew it was clean. And I think it was the same woman — she was kind of the crew chief on the team — and she knew it was clean too, in terms of having had everything wiped down, and the trash emptied and so on. But then she said to me something that’s stuck with me ever since, she said, “when I clean something, I like for it to *look* clean.”
Have you ever cleaned something like that? I mean, it’s clean, but to get it sparkling would require some extra amount of elbow grease that you figured you weren’t going to put in? Well, she wanted things sparkling. I think about it all the time, and I don’t always go the extra mile, I don’t always get things sparkling in my own home, but I always know when I haven’t and I think about why.
Anyway, she left me there, in that bathroom, to get things sparkling. I got to know that bathroom really well. And the bathroom after that. And the bathroom after that.
I got to know the different cleaners, which rags I liked better, and why you should never use cheap paper towels to clean a mirror (they leave streaks). I got to love it a little, the women I worked with, the rhythm. I’m pretty sure they didn’t love me back, but they tolerated me, at least, by the end of the summer.
So much goes into those magical moments on safari, so many housekeepers. I don’t mean to overlook that. What’s enabled by their work is the knock on the door at 5 or 5:30 am. I always stayed up too late the night before, reviewing photos or writing notes or trying to capture some star photography and failing badly and I always regretted it.
The tap tap tap. Good morning! Here is some coffee.
And you would stumble around, into the same clothes from the day before, still in the dark, and try to find the coffee and the sort of hard-tack-cum-cookie that would get your digestive system moving that day but not too quickly — you hardly wanted to spend time wishing for a bathroom while out in the bush — and then before you were quite ready the man with the stick would come and get you and you’d be off and hopefully it wouldn’t be very light yet but maybe, just maybe, you’d hear the hippos in the distance, returning to the river, or you might spot the first almost-translucent butterfly begin to flit among the strange and dusty flowers.
And it would be morning, and you might find yourself in love.
I might write more before the end of 2020, but if I don’t, all best wishes to you, and best wishes to all of us for a healthy, happy, love-filled 2021.
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