Kathleen was telling me the other day about a woman she'd known who, around the age of retirement, told her husband that she was retiring, which meant that there would no longer be any cooking going on and no housecleaning either, so he might as well face the fact that all meals would be taken in restaurants from here on out and there would be a maid.
I've been thinking about that. Thinking about how the work I do is never going to be something I retire from. If I told my husband what that woman told hers, Mr. Moon would look at me as if I'd lost my mind and then go on to discuss something else entirely like tires or hunting land or HD video cameras. He just wouldn't take me seriously. He does sometimes ask if I'll still cook for him when we get old, but not as much as he used to when the kids still lived here, fearing then that when they left, I wouldn't bother any more. I think he's pretty much accepted the fact that I will indeed cook and of course I will because hey! I get hungry. And going to a restaurant involves putting on a bra which we all know is not something I care to do unless the experience is going to prove worth it and most meals out do not.
Plus, I like to cook.
Now housekeeping is another matter. Parts of it I like. I don't mind doing laundry and or the dishes so much, or bedmaking. It's the actual cleaning that I hate. I have no idea why, but I do. Perhaps it's because it's so constant and endless and the result, although lovely, is so very transient. I clean and mop and within minutes the dogs have brought in some piece of wood and chewed it to slivers on the rug and there you go. Things just PILE UP, old catalogs and magazines and coupons for 20% off Bed, Bath, and Beyond. How many rain forests have been destroyed for those coupons? And the cabinets, no matter how fine my intentions, become avalanches waiting to happen when the doors are opened- cooking sheets and pyrex baking ware and muffin tins and bread pans all pouring out to bruise my feet or that cabinet where I keep the leftover containers, the plastic yogurt containers, the tupperware, the rubbermaid stuff- all of it seems to lose its lids, to take up too much space for what it's all worth.
Chaos theory in action.
Ah yah. I've strayed from my subject.
This is not a manifesto, believe me, about housekeeping or the work I do. I feel lucky beyond lucky to be able to have a life where I can grow a garden and make pickles and hang my clothes on the line and make what is now trendily called "slow food" but which I just call "food." And I doubt I'll ever want to give all of that up because that IS my life- not just my work.
But I think about the fact that there will never be a day when I don't do this sort of work unless I become like my grandmother when she got dementia and immediately forgot how to do any sort of cleaning or cooking or bedmaking or laundry. I mean Granny FORGOT and was UNABLE and so my grandfather, bless his old heart, had to learn to do those things which she had always done for him. And he did. Sort of.
What I'm trying to say here is that what I do is not really work. If it were, there would be a salary and a retirement from it, eventually. Not work in the definition of work that we use today. Work is going to an office or a kitchen in a restaurant or a hospital or a studio or a field. Work is not doing what needs to be done to keep a family healthy, happy, fed, and living in a state of semi-grace and order. Everyone does these things, mostly women, probably, but we all have to deal with the garbage and the filling of the refrigerator and the scrubbing of the toilets and the keeping some semblance of order in the household.
There used to be books on the Domestic Arts and there are still classes and schools for the Culinary Arts, but those are for people looking to be employed as chefs or cooks. There used to be Home Economic classes where girls (always girls) were taught to cook basic things and to sew a little bit and to set a table and to do the things that needed to be done to run a home. This is no longer true, as if everyone were just born knowing how to make a white sauce, how to sew on a button, that the forks go on the left, the knives and spoons on the right.
Meanwhile, magazines like Martha Stewart's thrive. Why? Because we all long for homes where things are not just "kept" but where there is a grace to it, an art, if you will. If our homes are fairly serene and well-run, parts of our souls can be serene and free to deal with life on a much clearer basis. Or so it seems to me, anyway.
But these ideas, like the idea of honoring the mother and what she does are more ideals than reality, I think.
We give lip service to mothers and their sacrifices and how important they are and then we send them off to work because they have to because mothers do not get paid for doing the most important work in the world- raising sane and happy and healthy children- and children can't live off love alone. We give lip service and pay good money for magazines promoting the idea that our homes can be beautiful and the keeping of them can be creative and satisfying while ignoring the fact that this takes actual work and money and that it's a lot easier to read and dream about such than it is to do it and no one has time anyway.
Well. It's Sunday. I have clothes to hang on the line and pickles to put away. I made seven pints of dills yesterday and the kitchen looks like a pickle factory with the canning kettle and the little jars of dill seed and the crock of sweet pickles working their way to perfection and the jars and lids and jar-lifter. The refrigerator is filled with cucumbers waiting their turn and half-gallons of vinegar stand in wait on the counter. Chaos. Barely controlled chaos.
But it is such a beautiful thing and so very satisfying to gather all the equipment and ingredients and sterilize jars and pack them with vegetables and make the brine and add the spices and twist all the lids and put them in the boiling water bath and time them and then lift them out to sit on a piece of newspaper and listen for the POP as the lids suck down and the process is completed.
That makes my heart happy.
As it does to see the sheets on the line and to know how they'll feel when we lay down on them tonight.
As it does to water the porch plants (Riley said yesterday, "You have plants EVERYWHERE!") and to check the progress of rooting begonias and sprouting new leaves on the mango.
No. I will never retire. Thank god I have Mr. Moon to provide for me.
I hope he thanks his lucky stars he has me to provide for him what I do. I think he does.
And in that way, I do certainly get paid to do what I do.
Which makes me feel guilty somehow, as if I am getting away with something that very few get away with these days, which is the practice of the Domestic Arts which makes my soul happy, my days busy and filled, and somehow myself satisfied.
Yes, I have to scrub toilets. No, I don't get social security. Yes, I get to can food that I grow. No, I don't earn my living. No, I am not Martha Stewart.
But I am me and I am happy, usually, doing these things that I do and yes, sometimes I need a vacation from it and YES! I am so lucky to be able to do so.
And there you have it. I am an anachronism in a modern world. I live in a house that is one hundred and fifty year old and I do things here that women would have done when it was built. My circumstances are different and my work is made much easier by my modern conveniences but I think I take the same pride in the result which is nothing more than doing the work that needs to be done, while having the luxury of being able to do it.
Perhaps I am just living in a dream world. Well, so be it.
It's a good dream and I take comfort in the fact that even as I feel guilty, I work hard and I do my best.
There is very little more one can ask of life than that.
