Osu Kannon Flea Market, Nagoya, Japan. Photo by Sarah

Sickness – the wild card, as David Miller called it.  In this case, some strain of salmonella, from a wholesome-looking huevo criollo.  I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of it, other than to say it slowed….me….down.  A lot.  To the speed of All Songs Considered, cloud-watching, and dreary-eyed reading in bed.  Yesterday, for the first time I felt like a human being again, and of course instantly took it for granted.  How is it that as human beings we’re capable of imagining and empathizing with so many things, and yet immediately after recovering from an illness it seems impossible to imagine how we felt so bad?

So Saturday morning I woke up with that very delicate sense of ok-ness – I laid there for a moment – am I ok?  Will I feel the urge to vomit in five seconds?  Chills?  Dizziness?  Nausea?  I gingerly stood up and the sense of ok-ness endured.  I padded around the house for a bit just marveling at this, ate breakfast savoring the ability to eat food without worrying how it’d taste the second time around, read a bit, and then –

Got down to cleaning.

I am the type of person who cleans when some definitive moment swells up out of nowhere, grabs me, and inspires me to remake the whole house.  Sure, I’ll mop and sweep and clean the kitchen, but I’m talking cleaning here, Japanese-style, on your hands and knees with a specialized scrub brush getting your heart rate up, panting, exorcising demons.  That kind of cleaning.  Sometimes an internal psychological clock goes off and it’s time for this kind of cleaning.

This happened yesterday.  I’m not sure what it was, but I took a shower, ate some chicken soup, put on my five dollar jumpsuit (yes, jumpsuit – bought on a whim with a friend in Japan), and got to it.

I love this kind of cleaning, with no time limits, no pressure, alone, just the right music, and a sort of Buddhist logic which allows you to begin anywhere, with any detail in the house, and then work your way from there, going round in circles, dawdling, coming back to the same points over and over, and what will emerge is some sort of organic reorganization.  I love finding stones behind shelves, things we’ve taken back from walks with the dog and forgotten, and the coins and small safety pins and 100 yen sewing kits and souvenirs from here and there that accumulate in neglected piles around the house and come back to life in cleaning.

Cleaning in my world is like putting together exhibits in a clutter museum. I have bus tickets from the outskirts of Beijing, leaves from Borneo, notebooks and journals from buses in Patagonia, race numbers from races in Madison, all stuffed into pockets here and there around the house.  I can conjure up a big cloud of nostalgia when I find one of these things and cleaning is stalled for at least five minutes while I sit, splayed on the floor, bringing back that bus ride when Jorge and I ate tea eggs and rode through villages in the mountains.

Then I get back to it, alternating between fetishizing clutter and busting dirt.  I move furniture.  Take apart the bathroom shelves, rearrange the toothpastes and sunscreens and medicines and half-empty bottles, sweep, mop, and put them back together again, in place.  All the while thoughts drift through my head as aimlessly as leaves drifting along a breeze.  Like running, cleaning gives me that out-of-body experience of being totally physically and mentally occupied and at the same time being liberated from the normal rooted-ness of thought.  Just as when I run my mind floats and I feel no desire to tie it down to a train of thought, when I clean it meanders here and there and I feel no need to track it.  Occasionally a thought will drop down into concreteness – like the thought that gave birth to what I’m writing now.  But mostly, I’m just there, working the sponge back and forth, letting those leaves drift vaguely through my head, focusing on a spot here, a spot there, the memory of stepping on a glass shard in the kitchen jutting through when I find the hydrogen peroxide, Jorge extracting the shard very carefully by digging it out with a needle, me with my eyes furiously clamped shut, and then its back to the sponge, the quiet of afternoon, the leaves.

Eventually, the house was clean, with that slightly disturbing but eminently satisfying smell of cleanliness (read: fake pine-smelling chemicals).  For a (very short) period of time, everything was in an ideal state.  All the nails and coins and scraps of paper were in pretty little piles in a basket, and the socks were in pairs, and the books were stacked one on top of another, edges matching.  The house was full of blank spaces where organization had finally swept away all the fliers and bits and pieces lying around everywhere.  It seemed entirely possible that we could live that way forever, clean white spaces here and there, things in appropriate piles, two shoes fitted snugly together against the wall…

And then here I am today, with Stella’s half-eaten bone a stone’s throw from my foot, and the desk piled high with books again, coffee cups and SIM cards and letters from friends in a chaos that doesn’t look or feel too different from that in my mind, now that it’s not roaming anymore, not so free to drift without having to fess up to one thought or another.  I’ll just have to wait until the internal cleaning clock goes off again, and then I can sink into another long afternoon of scrubbing and clutter, nostalgia and leaves.