Women's Work

The heaviest lifting involved in a move has got to be the purging that comes before it; mostly, the overly-organized among us annoy me, but there are times when it would be useful to be in those ranks. I never was, and so when it was time for me to relocate and I was the only adult left in the house to do the sifting and packing, the job was huge. It's true, you don't take it with you, or at least my husband didn't when he died: I inherited not only the accumulated stuff of twenty-five years of life together, but also numerous cartons of the thirty-some years of his life before we met. Everyone has them, those boxes that we move with us from attic to attic, and no one remembers what they contain. I went through them all, and through all the accumulation of our own years of marriage, and the accumulation of my two children's lives up to that point. Counting all four of us, that added up to 127 years' worth of stuff. That does not count the crates we'd each been carrying around from deceased relatives , his grandparents, my mother.

You understand there was a lot of stuff, and so I try to forgive myself for not completing the job before I moved--in the end, I finished off by throwing everything I hadn't gotten to into a new carton of its own, loading it onto the truck, and hauling it here with me. Naturally as we unloaded it all expanded again, and what filled a 1400-square-foot house in New Hampshire now also fills a 2700-square-foot house in New York, and the net effect is it looks like I never threw out anything. Where in my old kitchen I had two junk drawers, I now have eight of them; I gave away my piano when I moved and in this roomy house, I am quite sure there would not have been a place to put it. Lately though I've had the urge to have another go at it, which might be an expression of the primal urge to spring clean, or might just be me getting tired of living in disarray. I know women who dust their homes every day. For me, it's time to clean when I stop being able to stand the mess.

This week I tackled the 14-inch thick stack of recipes that I've clipped out over the years. This has proven to be particularly painful, harder even than it was to give my husband's clothes away. In the early years of my marriage I was never particularly concerned with making a home. My husband and I lived in houses, of course, slept there, ate there sometimes, paid rent and, three times in our lives together, packed up the old ones and moved into new. Until I had my daughter, though, I never thought about where I lived much beyond that. I grew up a daughter of a single mother, and a feminist, in a fiercely female universe and decided, like a good feminist child of the times, that the whole housekeeping business of womanhood wasn't happening for me. On the other hand, I always loved to cook. For many years it was hard to square that enjoyment with the larger issues of suppression and empowerment. (Luckily, age and apathy took over and replaced my militancy with a shrug--I enjoyed it, why not do it? It helped to discover I could also make a pretty decent living at it.)

Before that, though, came Baby, and when she was born I became intensely interested in feeding my family--maybe it was hormonal fallout from all the nursing I was doing, maybe it was idle creativity welling up and looking for some, for any, outlet. Whatever it was, I found myself sitting at our little table nearly every day, culling recipe after recipe from any place I could find them (this was in the days before the Internet was a presence in my household). It was a habit I never lost. That collection of clippings has grown to the point where it's housed in a dozen file folders and a shoe box. Of course I'll never live enough years or cook enough hours to possibly try that many recipes, and so it's time to winnow this, as well. Here, though, memory is reaffirming its quirky ways--sometimes I don't remember conversations I had a week ago, but going through all of these little squares and rectangles I cut out, some as long as fifteen years ago, I remember exactly where I found this or that recipe, how old my kids were, where I was in my marriage...remember exactly what I imagined our conversation would be as we bent over this or that meal.

It's sad, really, how much daydreaming I invested in this little corner of existence, and how much I'm still hanging onto it emotionally, all this time later. When I was a girl I loved my grandmother fiercely and was highly disdainful of parts of her life. From my viewpoint, too much of her energy went into the creation of things that were meant to be consumed-- she spent hours embroidering pillowcases that would eventually wear out, grew gardens, cooked meals and at the end of the day, it was hard to tell she'd done anything at all. All of her work was done in the materials of impermanence, cloth, vegetation, everything she ever made was meant to be used up. That may be why I am drawn to language, to fired clay, to stone--things that can be set down and trusted to remain right where you left them, no one coming by to gobble them down or wear them out.

A few years ago I looked at some cutwork pieces my grandmother had made--cutwork is a complicated kind of embroidery; she tried to teach me once but I never had the patience for sewing needles and those tiny, maddening scissors she used. I decided to translate those panels into clay tiles and made a series of them, thinking that it would be nice to have a more permanent record of the designs those hands made so many years ago. The truth is, once I made them I didn't like them. There was nothing technically wrong with the pieces, and if you saw them hanging somewhere you'd think they were fine. In my mind, though, I compare them with the fabric pieces that engendered them, and my clay copies fail, I think, because they don't show any trace of the pleasure I know she took in making stitch after tiny stitch for all those hours for a piece that was destined, ultimately, to live on top of a bureau somewhere in a remote corner of the household. It was like a willingness to be sacrificed. And that was fine with her, and I don't know why it was never fine with me.

Just like it's really not okay with me that no one, by which I mean my husband, is going to sit down and eat all these meals I'd so carefully prepared for over the years, the record of which I'm busy throwing away now. Not that I still don't have two children to cook for, but for reasons I can't quite articulate it's not the same thing, and each of these little scraps of paper, as I look them over and divest myself of them, one by one, is a sharp little rebuke about all the things I haven't managed to do in my life. Big things, and little. I came too late to the realization that maybe it would have been okay to live life more in its small moments, that it may be that small moments would be all that we are given. Came too late to the understanding of how soon the supper hour would be over, the dead having no more need to eat and me left standing with an armful of things I wish I'd done and won't do now. Still, maybe something of memory carries over. The first time I had a dream about my husband where he wasn't sick, I was cooking him eggs and he sat, quite contentedly, waiting to eat at our dining room table. Breakfast in the Otherworld Café, I joked with a friend later. I wonder. Perhaps in that other place my husband drowses remembering the times we did eat together. Perhaps my grandmother sits across from him at that table, still busy with her embroidery hoop. Maybe together they are happy there, and I get these glimpses of them are how they let me know that impermanence is okay, that simple intentions are also okay. That if the only gestures I ever make are feeble, fading, and finally lost, well, that all will be okay, too. Anyway it would be nice to be forgiven one's incompleteness. Nicest of all to be able to forgive it in oneself.