We began to eat at dusk and now darkness surrounds the house. Nightbird sounds and nighttime stillness enter through the open windows and screen door. Dinner is over and all who partook departed in different directions. The friends went home. The teenage children drove off or disappeared to the backyard studio. My partner, who always prepares the meal because she loves to cook, went to her bed to work or read or rest. I find myself alone in the kitchen, with candles burning low, dirty dishes on the table and counters, and leftovers to be placed in containers and stowed in the fridge.
Every household develops roles and patterns of work for its members. Mine is simple—cleaning the kitchen after dinner. This has always been the case and the experience has changed over the 20 years that this particular constellation of beings has lived together under the same roof. There were times that I resented being the one that had to stay up and clean. “Where did everybody go?” I would ask in my mind’s voice with some irritation. At other times I relished the silence and clear, practical process of returning the space to order. On certain days, particularly as the children have grown and their appearance at table becomes a special occasion, kitchen cleaning is a quasi-sacred ritual of service to a larger whole.
Since my children were little, I’ve felt that eating together was an important ingredient for developing our coherence as a family. Inasmuch as taking food is a biological need, it also embodies a cosmic process undergone by all living beings and at scales so infinitesimal or vast that our limited view can scarcely understand. If any attribute delineates the sacred, I think this universality does.
Eating is about the transformation of energies. Food becomes life, and not just outer activity and autonomic functions, but also thoughts, emotions, passions, and consciousness. Eating together, day by day and year by year, opens the possibility for the group or family to transform energies together, as a greater organism within which each person is a part. Cleaning the kitchen is like preparing an altar for this seemingly prosaic, but actually profound event of preparing and taking food together in a shared atmosphere.
When we moved into the old farmhouse, we decided to keep the hundred-year-old maple floors porous. We treated them with oil and wax rather than sealing the wood with polyurethanes. The result is that all the material of life becomes part of the wood. The old maple floor is literally impregnated with our blood, sweat, and tears. I clean the kitchen barefoot and sense the texture and temperature of the floor and its embodiment of the soul of the family with my feet.
I inherited a set of antique silver salt and pepper shakers from my grandmother. They came from the place she called The Old Country, carried across the Atlantic on a boat by her mother. A modest kiddush cup my father gave me for my bar mitzvah sits with the shakers on the windowsill behind the sink along with a baby cup inscribed with my partner’s name, and “1970.” I arrange these items like parts of an ancestral shrine and every few months polish the silver with respect and satisfaction. The process is nearly magical as tarnish gives way to sparkling shine. At the same time I feel I am polishing together with my grandmother and great-grandmother. We are simultaneously liberating the lunar radiance of the silver together.
Alone in the quiet kitchen I am peacefully present. Gone is the impatience and sense of injustice I felt when I was younger, when I thought I had something more important to do; when I believed I had things to prove and accomplish. Now the process is an inner one as though I am ordering my inner life and lineage as I bring order to the kitchen. Reviewing the ordered space and shining surfaces, I feel satisfaction with the result.
This article appears in July 2023.
