Laundry

A voice in me is  muttering, okay, enough now.  Switch it up.  Change the style.  Enough of the cat, raspberries, artichokes and now laundry with some twist of a sermon at the end.

I will. I will, but for now let me be.
Stay with what is working for my heart.  Sometimes in all things we need to stay put for a while to let things take root and to fill us before moving on.

My life is mostly made up of  cat, raspberry, artichoke and laundry moments.    These are the moments that give me deep joy and contentment.  Recently a friend reminded me of the blind man who shouts out to Jesus to have mercy on him.  The people yell at him to be quiet, but he persists, and Jesus asks him what he wants.   The blind man asks that he be able to see, and Jesus grants him sight, saying his faith has healed him.  I have wondered what I want from Jesus.  I too want to see.   I want to see God.  I want to see the hearts of my children.  I also want eyes to see the small wonders all around me in my very ordinary days.  The sacred moments of the raspberries, artichokes and laundry.  It is those moments that this blog is really about.

Laundry does give me  great pleasure.  That tangled mass of wet and dirty clothes in the tub, sorted into whites and colours and put in the washer.  On  sunny days when I have time, I hang the clean wet things on the laundry tree around the corner on the patio, stuck in the sand where the hot tub used to be.  I often remember  days gone by in our last home where we had a pulley laundry line extending from our backdoor out over the garden.  Sheets and towels flapping wildly in the wind, pulled off the line smelling fresh like a mixture of wind and sun.  On most days, I hug the clothes, warm and fluffy from the dryer, dropping them to the space on the hall floor where they wait for folding.  I like the soft and warm feel and the organized satisfaction of folding towels in neat rectangles.   Most often the kids do the folding and delivery of the clothes to each room.  We have at least twenty plastic laundry baskets bought by  gardener husband in moments of frustration as he trips over the piles of clothes and we try to get organized, but still there are never enough. More often than not the baskets get left in corners all over,  full of  tangled assortments of  clean and dirty whatevers.

There are wet masses of dirty crumpled laundry in the corners of my soul too.  As my kids have processed their lives, we often speak of scooping up the moldy masses of forgotten memories stuck in the corner of their hearts, airing them out one by one and hanging them up as healing recognition of their own history.   It feels good in the end.  Just like the laundry.