Dust

So I was standing on the dining room table a few days ago, having a pocket-sized existential crisis. I had just squashed a second tiny spider easing his way down from the blades of the ceiling fan, and I was having visions of an egg sac hatching out up there. Which, no. Just no.

Mercifully I saw no arachnid families plotting parachute parties over our dinner table. What I saw was dust aplenty. I do clean my ceiling fan blades periodically, but for pete's sake: it hasn't been that long since I was up there with a pail of soapy water. August, maybe? Shouldn't I be able to get by with the feather duster for a measly two months?

In the moment it was overwhelming: the cleaning, the laundry, the never-never-but-never-ending paper. I had just put down the day's mail, thinking I didn't have it in me right at that moment to deal with the pile yet again, knowing that one day's undealt-with pile turns into a fanged and fire-breathing heap of time suck in no time flat. (I expect all y'all even-tempered types are thinking a soupçon of Zoloft might be appropriate. Welcome to my peaked-and-valleyed inner landscape.)

And then I thought about what that dust was, exactly, those tiny bits of skin and clothing fluff (and, okay, the carcasses of dust mites if you must be buzz-killingly precise about it). I was surprised a few years ago when I realized that unused rooms don't actually get very dusty -- the dust piles up where the people are. My house gets full of dust because it's full of life.

One year we had a Christmas tree that shed needles to beat the band. I think it waited until I wound up the vacuum cord and then did a brisk shimmy, showering the carpet with a fresh crop. I did not want to be ranting about our Christmas tree. Better a slightly prickly carpet where peace is than an immaculate floor in an apartment where Mom is ranting about how the Christmas tree is out to get her, to...um...totally mutilate Prov. 15:17. I knew that I wanted a live tree and not a fake one and so that Christmas I kept telling myself something I've been saying ever since, "Life is messy."

It's a good mantra for mothers, I am convinced, and I used it again to talk myself down from my perch on the dining room table. This is where my family gathers, I said, to share meals and play games and finish homework. Ergo, dust. The bedrooms get dusty because they are full of people, who pray and sleep and dream there. The living room gets dusty because of the children who sprawl there happily to talk about their elaborate Lego civilization with its own currency and constitution, to read the books that pile up relentlessly on the end tables, to wrestle until a parent says "Take that game outside!" It's good dust.

This is the season for stripping and shedding. The trees are telling the glory of God; I cannot walk outside without praying, "Me too, Lord: when I go to lay down something you have given me, let it shout out your glory. Teach me how to let go, to trust that you can make something beautiful of the letting go." The detritus in my home -- the cast-off papers, the flaked-off skin, the fallen hair -- it all reminds me that this life is given us to be laid down.

Those could be gloomy thoughts, remembering that the children whose bodies I have tended so carefully will leave them behind someday. But they don't have to be gloomy. I am thinking about the privilege of carrying an immortal soul in a mortal body, about the truth that shocked Wormwood into heresy: "For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left."