Perhaps this is one secret of re-enchantment

Or, The Sacramental Masterpiece of Vacuuming

Hi friends,

On the last day of the old year, I dismantled the trappings of Christmas. I packed away the nativity that has perched on a mantle or a bookshelf or a table in various homes across countries and provinces for more than twenty years now, Brian bought it for me in the early years of our marriage. I nestled garish and precious homemade ornaments of popsicle sticks and printer-paper kindergarten photographs and cartoon bears from once-visited tourist traps; unwound the gold tinsel from the plastic branches of the tree; unstacked the prickly pole and stuffed the once-magical-and-twinkly tree unceremoniously into a worn soft cardboard box. The basket of Christmas picture books was lifted from its temporary place on the fireplace hearth and restored to the upstairs bookcase. Garland was wound up and tucked away in plastic shopping bags for the storage boxes next to the felt Advent countdown calendar. I washed the Christmas candy dishes with broken bits of Smarties and leftover nuts on the sideboard, putting them away for another year.

Then I began to sweep up the bits left behind: the plastic pine needles, the sad hooks from ornaments that did not survive the season, the crumbs from nanaimo bars, the bits of wrapping paper that had hidden under the cat-hair-covered tree skirt. I dusted and polished. Opened the windows to the cold air of the old year, watched the lace curtains lift in the cold breeze while I worked. I pulled out the vacuum for the final sweep of our home, now restored.

I dragged the monstrous vacuum up and down the stained carpet. We did have the carpets cleaned this winter and, not a word of a lie, the very next day someone spilled their tea right in the middle of the living room and, try as we might to get the stain out, it is now there as yet another permanent record of us, like every stain on the carpets of this house and the chip on the counter and the dents on the walls and the cracks in the grout from a dropped basketball bag and pencil markings on the doorways telling us how tall the children have gotten, and this is just how it is.

Just four years ago, I couldn’t vacuum our home. I could not do many things, if I am more honest with you now than I was back then. There were many things I had lost in the aftermath of an accident previous and then the years of decline that followed it and then the cumulative nest of losses that held me fast, bringing my life to a smaller point. Big things like strength and skating with my children and mobility and hope. Small things like cleaning my home and income and going for a walk down the block or even down the hallway.

Four years ago at the turn of the calendar, I lived in a saggy brown leather chair with a footstool, waited on with patience by my family. From that chair, I watched my father move the couch in our living room to vacuum underneath it for me, then move it back. He gently vacuumed up stale Cheerios and goldfish crackers from the seams of our furniture and plumped pillows that would be smushed again in minutes. My mother ran dust cloths over the surfaces beside him, she lifted up my mug from the table beside me and refilled my tea while smiling, trying to make this easier, again and again. They worked efficiently, knowing that it pained me to watch them care for my home for me, making it seem like the most unremarkable thing in the world to clean my home while I sat watching, resenting and thankful in equal measure. Sometimes I would get up to try to help but I couldn’t drag the vacuum up and down the carpets without pain and exhaustion, I couldn’t bend down to pick things up, and I would be gently returned to the brown chair I had grown to loathe, and there I would sit again, watching.

But this weekend, I vacuumed my house myself.

And I went for a long walk as I do almost every day. I pulled on my winter gear and my boots with the best grip on the sole (because whenever someone needs to convince me of depravity, they just need to remind me of the people who do not salt the ice of their communal sidewalk in front of their property in wintertime.). “Careful, it’s treacherous there,” the older folks will caution me when we pass on those stretches of slippery sidewalks, under the bare branches of aspens.

It has actually not been a very cold winter so far, something I enjoy for my walks but despair of for my imaginary supposed grandchildren. The sky is a wide, crisp prairie blue without a cloud to be seen; if someone is beside me, I will say out loud, “Good gracious, look at that, eh?” but I’m usually alone on my walks so I just tip my face up to the heavens and take deep breaths. The mountains to the west come into view when I hit the trail on the edge of the neighbourhood and I know it is unsparing grace to live within sight of the Rockies, to walk in such sunshine and cold, to be able to say good morning to the plump black-billed magpies perched on fences and in the boughs of spruces, to have a home with multi-coloured Christmas lights on the eaves waiting for me at the end of the road.

I’ve talked to you before about how I spent the four years “pulling levers” of every wisdom and practice and habit in an lurching effort towards whatever “healing” body and soul might mean for me. Some of those levers worked, others did jack all. Like all great transformations, it was slow and painful, humbling and imperceptible, unwitnessed and faintly ridiculous at times.

This kind of uncelebrated healing turns a gaping, angry wound into new skin over your soul, tender as a baby’s soft fontanel, still throbbing and unfinished. And time passes and bones knit together over pieces of outsider’s hardware that have become part of you now and exercises that seems unbelievably mundane yet frustrating become the thing that gives you your steps and you relearn how to sleep again and you stop trying to self-talk and self-medicate and self-delude yourself out of being sad. And the wounds became bright red scars with stitch marks still visible but eventually become fainter and less angry, until they are a raised line, tender when poked yet able to endure. The marks of this will be visible forever even as you remember that you love the snow and the giant orange cat snoring on the bottom step and the scorch marks on the kitchen table and the feel of the wind in your hair again and the re-emergence of your freckles from the sunshine. No matter how many levers you pull, some things remain broken or changed or unrestored. This is just true.

At bedtime on New Year’s Eve, I tucked in our littlest to bed with her stuffies beside her and her white noise machine chugging and the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on the ceiling above her bed. Nearly nine years ago, she arrived as our surprise baby; so much younger than her now-teenaged siblings, she keeps us firmly in the Little Kid Stage and there isn’t a day I’m not wildly grateful for the gift of her stuffies and stars and stubborn insistence on Santa Claus. “See you next year,” I said as I tucked her in, knowing it’s the most-worn out joke in the world, but as she figured it out for the first time, she began to laugh. She laughed until she had hiccups, “See you next year…” she kept muttering with delight, shaking her head. Even tired old things can bring delight, I guess, I need to remember that this year. Perhaps this is one secret of re-enchantment.

It’s the turn of the calendar and everywhere I turn, self-loathing is big business. Change this, change that, get control of your own life, your own narrative, I get it. When the world feels overwhelming, it’s a pleasant thing to turn towards what we can change. We feel so profoundly out of control these days that any bit of agency helps. But even beyond that, it’s a seed of wanting something different, something else, something more, something true.

Pull your own levers, I hope you do. I hope it becomes a testimony of your faith, of your belief in what is possible and impossible and hopeful again. I hope you make big plans and buy new journals and make charts and choose words of the year. Do the journalling questions and write out the prayers and make lists and have the earnest conversations with fellow hopefuls

Whatever wakes up the part of you that thinks, maybe, maybe, perhaps hope is not entirely lost yet is an altar. You’ll never find me snickering at the ways we creatures try to reach out for the stray threads of pluck and dreams. If we didn’t cherish a mulish belief in the possibility of transformation, we might as well be done, I guess.

But sometimes the biggest victory line we cross is the one no one else can acknowledge but us. It’s no before and after picture, it’s no Instagram influencer caption or Top Ten Ways list. Testimonies aren’t usually scaled for mass production.

It’s the sacramental masterpiece of I’m sorry; of a teenager’s arms around you in the kitchen because you got teary on a Tuesday about how fast the children grew up; of a good night’s sleep; of a perfect sentence in a new book to read; of an old broken chair that had became a prison loaded into the back of a pick-up truck to be deposited at the town dump at last; of the cackling of your last little kid at a pretty tired old joke; of your sister opening the special tea for your visit; of quietly rising in the morning to let your sprawled lover sleep a bit longer; of the unyielding blue sky at winter; of a walk in the wide-awake first day of the new year; of an older and wiser neighbour with a bag of salt going up and down the sidewalks to help out the ones who forgot or couldn’t; of vacuuming your own floors after Christmas; of things you thought you had lost forever somehow coming home again, long after you stopped watching for their arrival.

Whatever comes this year, don’t disdain the small wanderings that bring you home to yourself eventually in these coming days.

Don’t miss the gift of faith for just the next right choice you can make and the grace for the days when there are no good choices, only long suffering and time and something small to love.

Keep watch on the horizon for the light that is imperceptibly returning.

Find the altars where you are reacquainted with the song and silence of God, stay there worshipping in your own way until the pillar of fire or the cloud of knowing moves again.

If there is a scrap of hope left to you as the calendar pages turn, tuck it into bed and tape glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling above you both.

May 2024 bring a bit of wonder back to you,

S.

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In case you missed these recent Field Notes:

• Looking back at 2023: Field Notes 2023 in review

• The most we can hope for is love: Reimagining Advent :: Week Four

• Holding Scraps: Reimagining Advent :: Week Three

• Advent comes, not in spite of this moment in time but precisely because of it.: Reimagining Advent :: Week Two

• Let the Darkness Gather, We’ll Make a Home There: Reimagining Advent :: Week One

• My Favourite Books of 2023: The faves for fiction and nonfiction books + announcing our upcoming Advent series