225/365 Things are important

"When you take a dirty floor and make it spotlessly clean, and then polish it until it shines, it radiates back to you the love which you poured into it; the divinity of that floor has been drawn forth" --Eileen Caddy

I just scrubbed my shower walls. They are glass, and therefore get dingy quickly. Kid hands, soap scum, hard water, the first creeping bits of mold. I scrubbed them down and dried them with a squeegee. They aren't perfect. I need to do more on them, but I also need to bring the rest of the bathroom up to at least that level. The floors, the walls--I wash the toilet and sink regularly, and wipe down the tub after baths, but these other surfaces get neglected. I need to get down on my hands and knees with a scrub brush and get the grout clean. I need to whisk away the house spider under the sink. I need to vacuum up the stray bits of cat litter that get under the feet and annoy.

Because I know that sigh of relief, I know the happiness of a clean room. A really clean room, inside and out. Baseboards and ceiling and corners and surfaces. Dust sucked up and wood polished with lemon oil and things old and new made bright and shiny again.

We are working on cleaning the girls' room--it is huge and they are scattered. It is on the 3rd floor and therefore out of my sight unless I intend to be there. We've been gathering up the fragments into baskets and sorting out legos and dollhouse spoons (3/4 inch long) and Polly Pocket shoes. Things are nearly finished, and the girls have gone to visit my mother-in-law, so I know it will be ready for them when they get back. Ready for a new school year and a fresh start in many ways.

The things we choose to surround ourselves with require care and attention. It's one thing to allow things to relax with time: the plate with the small chip, the quilt with a couple of repaired winklehawks (a winklehawk is a 90 degree L-shaped tear. You should use that word), the dresser your husband's great-grandfather built with square nails. It's another thing to neglect things so that they age prematurely. In my daughters' montessori upbringing, one of the things they learned first was a category called "practical life." Some of this was pouring and tying and using tweezers, that sort of stuff, but a lot of it was care of the environment. Handwashing. Flower arranging. Sweeping, dusting, care of candles (in the Catholic montessori atrium). Polishing of all kinds. Tending plants. These things are important, and not just for a tidy classroom. They're important because all of these things are gifts, one way or another. We should treasure them.