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Cleaning up
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The Ecotone wiki site is a collection of essays on "place" and its meaning to the writers. My other bursts of place-idity: Books and place |
It seems to me that there is no more intimate way to interact with a place than to clean it. The act is an expression of responsibility, if not of love, and anyone who cleans a place regularly must come to learn its habits: the places where dust falls and where footfalls brush dust away, where fingermarks accumulate and where nature pushes at it, to crack concrete, perhaps, or to fill bare spots with moss.
I knew an intern once who was so idealistic that she habitually collected litter from the sidewalks in Cleveland as we strolled to lunch. This made it difficult to talk to her, and I worried about her catching something, and I persuaded her that she only had to pick up things she interacted with, and that it was OK to ignore the rest. I had to admire her universal sense of responsibility, though. (Ha. Kids!) Visiting a relentlessly orderly friend's house, I admired the place's thoughtful decorations and general sense of comfort and realized, driving home, that their careful cleanup might say less about their psychology than about their willingness to take a day off before we arrived to put things in order. Maybe they expected us to expect it of them. A little disorder in the dresse After 30 years, the author of that insight escapes me. It's as true of parks as it is of people, and one of the charms of my inner ring suburb is that its public spaces have grown a bit grizzled over time, and that wear-and-tear reveals something about the generations that have passed here before me. I have never visited Disney World and am reluctant to. The very idea of a manicured, perfectly controlled theme park makes me feel oppressed. The spaces I have around me, however, take that idea to something of an extreme, and I am becoming an admirer of spartan, empty spaces with white walls and wooden floors such as you see pictures of people meditating in. I originally proposed this topic as an Ecotone blogging idea with the thought that a writer might use it to explore what he or she thinks while doing mindless chores. I thought it might be fun to explore my own wanderings as I took care of what needs taking care of, and there seemed to be a good scope for description. But good grief, no one is going to want to read about the interface between broodings about conservatives and the economy and the sweeping in the kitchen. So I suggest this: You really s hould check out this song by the comic folk singers Peter and Lou Berryman of Madison, Wisc., titled "Sauerkraut (Cleaning the Refrigerator)" on the Digital Tradition Web site. pfui. |
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