When I was little, objects were very important to me. They had a life in them that no one else understood, least of all grownups. I wasn’t indiscriminate; the objects I loved were special in specific ways, even though now, thinking about them as an adult, I realize they were objectively junk: a fat-faced ceramic chipmunk holding an acorn, a piggy bank shaped like a lemonade stand, a cheap cracked frame with a maudlin picture of some flowers in it. These things did not have sentimental value — they weren’t gifts or mementos, I never knew where they came from — but even so, I felt very deeply about them. Every Saturday, I would take them off my dresser, wipe the dresser down with a sponge, then polish each object carefully before replacing them in the exact order I had taken them down.
This odd little ritual had its roots in a feeling I can’t quite describe: something primal, preverbal. By instinct, I used to seek this feeling out in books, gravitating towards stories in which ordinary life was made textured by the description of a cup or a meal, or a catalogue of daily chores. The Boxcar Children and their meals of blueberries and milk, accompanied by Benny’s chipped pink cup scavenged from the dump, with the washing-up done in a creek with a bit of soap; Laura Ingalls and her long winters of privation occasionally punctuated by joy in the form of a canned peach or a piece of ribbon candy; Sam Gribley, in “My Side of the Mountain,” pounding acorns into flour, sewing clothes from deerhide in his hollowed-out tree — I half-believed that I was all of these children, and I tried to emulate them as far as possible in my suburban, 1980s life.
I didn’t get very far. But the impulse was the important thing, the heightened awareness that everyday things like soap and bread and milk were to be cherished in a world where very often these things were treated as nothing — afterthoughts, or less. Even as late as high school, I felt a pang when one of my cheesy figurines was broken by a friend. I still liked to clean my room, liked to bake, liked to fold my shirts into precise thirds.
Gradually, this feeling about the domestic world shifted. A certain kind of expectation goes along with being educated, especially if you are a woman. Cheryl Mendelson, a lawyer and philosophy professor who wrote a huge tome on housekeeping, notes in her introduction to “Home Comforts” that being too preoccupied with the daily activities of a housewife is socially unacceptable. “Until now I have almost entirely concealed my passion for domesticity,” she writes. “I knew I would not want this information about me to get around … I belong to the first generation of women who worked more than they stayed home. We knew that no judge would credit the legal briefs of a housewife, no university would give tenure to one … no one who mattered would talk to one at a party.”
That Mendelson knew — “without thinking much about it” — that she should keep this part of her personality hidden seems consistent with the general feeling in the modern world about housework, about cleaning. Taking care of the house is a chore. Cleaning is an annoyance. Taken further: Cleaning is a sign of mental illness, shorthand for someone whose paranoias run so deep that they bleed out into the most mundane aspects of the day. Recently, I was watching the pilot episode of Netflix’s “The Sinner,” in which the most telltale sign that a young mother is about to go berserk and murder a man at the beach is that she takes out all her spice jars and scrubs the inside of the cupboard.
So goes the common narrative: that caring overly much about the domestic world is somehow less important than caring about art, politics, history or science. I am sorry to say that, in my adult life, I have not been able to combat that storyline as well I could wish. I have never really recovered that old childhood sense of the depth and texture of the physical world — not through the collecting of things nor the performing of ritual (though occasionally, standing over the stove in the early morning listening to the stirrings of a warming kettle, I get a flash of it). There’s always been too much to do, too many people to see, too many places to visit, too many other things to learn; and how much weight lies in washing an ugly (chipped) cup, anyway?
But stories change, as we all know, especially now — faster sometimes than your heart can stand it. A few days ago I was standing at the kitchen sink washing a cereal bowl (probably for the tenth time, because in this surreal new world, I don’t always register when a job is complete, and sometimes I walk into walls or bump into chairs) when I saw a fox out the window, a beautiful blond fox with black legs. It looked at me, I swear, before trotting away through the woods, and suddenly I was 7 years old again, with the world contracted down to soap, hot water and the washing of a bowl. I’ve eaten out of that bowl hundreds of times without giving it a second thought, but in that moment, it became as beloved as any treasure from my childhood. I dried it carefully and put it back on the shelf.
Francie Lin is an editor and writer who has a complicated relationship with domestic life. She lives in Florence.