Sweeping the Kitchen While Others are Working or: the work and the work

The bristles of the broom pass over the kitchen floorboards like the tongue of a mother cat rasping between a kitten’s ears. The shape of the room is irregular, the corners deep, the baseboards loose. There are small tangle-limbed spiders in the places where the walls meet. They flinch away from the bristles of the broom. I can’t help but catch a strand of webbing here and there, tugging it out from under their careful feet. They will rebuild after I’m gone.

The floor of the kitchen is calloused with work. It knows the rhythms of hungry pacing, of hurried preparation, of sated sleepy conversation. It catches the footfalls that pass between sink and oven, counter and cupboard, pantry and compost bin. Of all the rooms in a well-loved house, the kitchen is the most alive. 

And I am most alive when I’m in the kitchen. I ask myself big questions in this room and I find answers with my heart. I ask myself small questions in this room and I find answers with my body. Is this pan hot enough; who are we to each other; is the milk still good; what is my future? 

In the next room, there is the rainfall patter of laptop keyboards. Focus has settled over the house. There is work being done. An occasional sigh simmers through the focus, not breaching the quiet but lifting it in a bedsheet-ripple that quickly settles again like heavy velvet. 

The house is attuned to that focus. All houses are attuned to the rhythms of the lives inside of them. There is the respectful discretion of the washroom, where the body is at its most methodical. The living room is codependent, slightly fretful. The dining room is a humming extrovert when mostly-occupied, a pouting louche when mostly-vacant. They watch; they consider; they react. They are alive.

But the life in those rooms is not quite the same as the life of the kitchen. The other rooms of the house sit and doze when no one is in them; they spring to attention at the sound of footfalls, eager and attentive. The kitchen is different. It stays up late at night and wakes early in the morning, stretches languidly in the sleepy warm expanse of the afternoon. It carries the pulse of the domestic nervous system. It doesn’t wait for us to come to it with need; it is doing its own work when we are away. 

That sense of independence makes it easy to treat the kitchen carelessly, as if it’s a tool to be used. How reflexive it can be to treat our friends and collaborators this way when we trust them; how effortless to assume that their independence represents an absence of need and desire. Too often I enter the kitchen thinking only of my own fulfillment–but when I come to the kitchen to clean, I reverse my approach. I come ready to search out what is needed and address it. And when I take the time to ask this place what it needs, it always answers.  

This constant push and pull of question and answer settles into the places the kitchen and I embrace. The click and whoosh of the flame on the stovetop; the thunk of my hip against the open cupboard door; the cool counter pressing up into my palms. The drifting debris that floats across the kitchen floor until I come to collect it. 

In the next room, an exchange of words as my companions rise into each other’s attention. I take advantage of the moment to move a chair with a lazy hook-and-pull of my foot instead of picking it up. The chairlegs groan against the floor. This way, our sounds will meet each other as the house drifts from silence to noise. I snake my broom into the place where the chair was, pursuing whatever might be hiding there. 

I am sweeping the kitchen the same way I run my hands through my lover’s hair. I am sweeping the kitchen the same way I straighten a friend’s tie. I am sweeping the kitchen the same way I will someday smooth my palm over the soft round shoulders of a dozing baby. This is an act of care between close companions. The kitchen cannot reach these corners and crevices itself, but I can. In this moment of intimacy, we are family.

I am also sweeping the kitchen the way I heat the kettle and put butter out to soften and slice a plate of apples to deliver to the next room. My companions will come into this room to meet its life with theirs, and the meeting will be that much more effortless, that much more pleasant. This, then, is two acts of care at once: Care for these people, and care for this home. 

I pass the broom from hand to hand as I move through the room; I lean it against my shoulder as I stoop to sweep the pile of debris into the dustpan. The voices in the next room are rising, the idle words becoming an extended exchange. The work is done and the work is done. Soon, I will leave the kitchen to go find out what’s being said. The kitchen will stay awake after I’ve passed into the other room. I trust that it will greet me warmly when I return.

I put the broom away and run a hand across the countertop. We are at home in each other, and I am alive.

Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive is a yearlong essay series in which we acknowledge, celebrate, and examine the objects and experiences that keep us going, even through the hardest of times. The series is free to read, for everyone, forever.

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In the meantime, remember: Do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

Sarah Gailey - Editor
Josh Storey - Production Assistant | Lydia Rogue - Copyeditor
Shing Yin Khor - Project Advisor | Kate Burgener - Production Designer