Late Summer Corn Chowder
with Rosemary, Leeks & Baby Potatoes
A few days ago, I decided to skip my morning meditation for a different kind of quiet time that would relax me before settling into my workday, by cleaning the window behind my desk. I recently rearranged the family room to have my desk in front of the window to help boost my mood and energy. The exterior of the windows hadn’t been cleaned since last summer when I excitedly bought a squeegee on an extension pole to help get the job done. I know, who gets excited about this kind of thing?
I’m a cleaning fanatic, and sweep my floors once a day, sometimes twice. I wash dishes throughout the day so they don’t pile up since I don’t have a dishwasher. I make sure the sink is clean before going to bed at night. Even when I used to throw parties in my former life, I never went to bed and left cleaning up for the morning.
Waking up to a tidy house and clean sink is comforting. My way of starting the day with a clean slate. I grew up with a chaotic sense of organization. My mother always had magazines piled on chairs so you’d have to move them to sit. Her dining table, sideboard and pretty much any surface had neat piles arranged on them, but they were still piles, the beginning steps of becoming a hoarder.
When my parents fought, and my mother retreated to her room, my father’s reaction was to clean. As if wiping away dust and vacuuming could fix things. He’s been gone 25 years now, and even my morning sweeping habit reminds me of those early childhood years, unaware I was learning how to cope and escape amidst the chaos. Cleaning calms me, reminding me of the elements I can control when I’m especially feeling the changes I really want or need are seemingly out of my control.
So, there I was at 6:00 am, mixing up some Murphy’s oil and white vinegar with warm water in a bucket to clean the outside of the window. There are two windows in the family room, and it made sense to do both, right?
The second window is near the air conditioning unit to the house’s central air system. The quince tree that’s been there since before I bought my house 10 years ago has grown aggressively in that time, and I’d been meaning to trim it. Since I have boundary issues with cleaning and organizing, I went to the garage, got the hand saw and started cutting away enough branches so I could safely get to the outside of the window without getting tangled in the quince tree’s thorns. There’s a little 2-inch border of dirt that I couldn’t manage to reach, silently taunting me as I write this.
Two windows down, I decided why not just clean the other 6 windows and both porch doors? Lest you think my insanity has no boundaries, I did stop myself from doing the 13 front and back porch windows. Well, I did do two of them because they had mulberry-stained bird droppings on them.
While cleaning the window by my desk, which started this whole situation, I realized that the inside of the storm window was an accomplice in this.
How the inside of a storm window on a window that never even gets opened can get so dirty is beyond me, but I decided the whole point of having a clean window to look out of would be moot if I didn’t do this one final window washing task. The windows in my 1931 built Sears kit house are old wooden ones, the original, and work on a rope system. Half the windows no longer open because the ropes are broken, and it’s been on my list to figure out how to fix them myself. You know, one of those “one these days” kind of projects.
Both ropes are intact in the family room windows, leading me to believe that pulling down the top of the window would be easy peasy. And it was. I wiped the window clean and breathed a sigh of relief that 45 minutes later my simple task of cleaning one outside window was finally done.
Then I went to push the window up to close it.
The rope on the left side of the window was slack, and refusing to snake itself back into the frame. The morning had been going peacefully until that moment, feeling good about having accomplished something, knowing my workday would likely go off the rails as it tends to when you’re pulled in many directions.
I thought about just cutting the rope, and adding to the collection of half broken windows to be fixed one of these days. It would’ve provided a split-second solution that caused a long term problem, and in the process negating all the positive vibes I was feeling from my morning cleaning.
I set up the step stool, got the flathead screwdriver and silently prayed the screws would easily come out where the rope mysteriously disappeared into the window frame. Success. Next up was some WD-40 sprayed generously onto the rope and hardware. Rope frame screwed back into the window frame, I attempted to close the window again. It went further up but the rope was still stubborn, refusing to go in completely.
A feeling of calm washed over me.
This rope wasn’t my enemy. It was just suffering from neglect. I needed patience to give it the attention it needed. I repeated the process of unscrewing the frame, greasing with WD-40, and then attempting to close the window 3 or 4 more times until the window finally closed. I even tempted fate by opening and closing the window a few times to make sure it was really fixed.
An hour and 15 minutes after setting out to clean that one window, my task was complete. When I stare out the window now, I’m reminded of how important persistence is when it comes to getting the things we really want in life.
As for that window behind me with that 2-inch border of dirt? On closer inspection, I realized it was actually on the inside of the middle storm window. The top and bottom windows, along with the storm windows and screen had to be opened in just the right way for me to reach the area that needed cleaning. Sometimes, maybe oftentimes, stepping away is the action needed to find the solution.
—xo, j.
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