Chasing Away Shadows

~ Deepam. Deepam. ~

My childhood Summers were spent mostly at my maternal grandmother’s home in Kerala. My Ammamma, my Mothermother, was brilliant, a self-educated soul who read without discrimination. Sharp-witted, insightful, funny, and loving, with little interest in cooking. She would delight in things of beauty, and my mother would secret away small presents that would thrill her. When Ammamma died, we found an almirah full of Avon hand-painted soaps with beautiful flowers on them. She had squirrelled them away, considering them too precious to ever use.

~ Deepam. Deepam. ~

Ammamma held strong religious beliefs and many superstitions. Children shouldn’t cry in the evening because it would bring out the evil eye. If they did, there was a complex ceremony of roasting dried red chilies and other whole spices, which would then be waved in circles in front of the crying child’s face while prayers were incanted. Of course, the crying child immediately stopped, because they’re instantly distracted with how delightful to be made a fuss of, what is that funny smelling stuff, what’s she muttering, is she praying? Perhaps, it really did ward off the evil eye too.

~ Deepam. Deepam. ~

Ammamma staunchly believed that if you handed money to someone through a doorway, you would be forever poor. That money would go out through the doorway, and the remainder of your wealth would obediently follow. She would actively demand that people step one side or the other of the door to conduct their business.

~ Deepam. Deepam. ~

I can’t count the number of times she scolded me for sitting on a threshold with my legs either side of the door. Kerala houses have framed doorways, and on a hot day, there’s nothing so satisfying as sitting on the wide frame of the doorway between the dining room and the garden outside, catching any passing breeze. In Ammamma’s eyes, this was irritatingly indecisive. “You cannot have each foot in a different boat!” she would shout in Malayalam, and the visual image of my feet in different canoes floating on a canal in the backwaters of Kerala, as I valiantly tried to stay upright and not do the splits, would have me in fits of giggles.

~ Deepam. Deepam. ~

The quietest, most precious of her superstitions though, involved light and shooing away the darkness. Every evening, as the sun went down, before a single electric light was turned on in the house, she would light an oil lamp and pace quietly through every room chanting deepam, deepam (light, light). It was a spiritual sweeping away of all the frightening terrors that lurk in darkness and shadow. Her call would ring in every room, and only after she had waved the lit oil lamp, the mystic broom of God, could the lightswitch be flicked on.

When I was there, it was my job. Reverently, silently, conscious of keeping my footfalls soft and cushioned, I would carry the lamp in my hands, my eyes darting between the oil threatening to spill over the lip of the lamp, and the floor ahead of me. I would chant my breathy deepam, imbuing it with as much gravitas and heartfelt wish to banish the unholy as I could. It is a memory of a stillness of spirit, a quiet prayer, edged with terrifying shadows, that I still find sanctuary in.

I don’t carry on that daily tradition, but in every house I’ve ever lived in, before we have spent a single night there, I have been sure to walk through the rooms, padding softly, lit oil lamp in hand, thinking of my Ammamma, and chanting deepam deepam.

Winter Cherry, or, How We Began

“How many lifetimes does it take to learn the facts of life? (And how long do you have to live to recover from them…?) Is it fact that helps us recover – or is it metaphor? Is it the hard knowledge of what really happened, like actual botanical material? Or is it the flesh of comparisons between what happened and what that was like, the blooming of explanations?” --Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden: An Artist [Begins Her Life’s Work] at 72

I was cleaning the basement as I wrote this. Or I should say, I was supposed to be.

I had stared at that quote by Molly Peacock off and on for weeks, since the first time I came across it on page 63 of a book I was reading for work. That is how life, and grief, catch you: when doing or supposed to be doing something else, getting on with this flimsy business of living. For the first few weeks of spring 2015, as Dead Housekeeping launched to a stunning response of gratitude and warmth, it happened almost out of the corner of my eye, done mostly with my left hand while my right hand continued….whatever it is a right hand does. In my case, I was reading dozens of books for a client in education, skimming the cream from thousands of years of human culture and serving it up for educational assessment in a dry state a long way from where I sat.

This book of Molly Peacock’s was on an approved, pre-licensed list of materials, and so I checked it out of the library and brought it home. That was all. Just a day in the life of a worker and survivor.

But then it subtly blew my mind.

The story behind The Paper Garden is a story of how housekeeping and care can have a fragile but definitive triumph over loss. Poet Molly Peacock weaves her own story of loss and creative life with that of Mary Delany, the 18th-century British artist who seems to have invented the modern paper collage. That’s sort of our story, too: The story of this website and this human project, this pixel garden, this well-kept House of the Dead.

It started, as many important human events do, late at night, between two people, in the dark.

Meredith Counts and I were shooting the breeze with a host of other shouty humans we like to hang out with on Facebook, leaning hard on our ALLCAPS buttons, when I happened to tell about my first husband’s technique for folding towels. It’s more impressive in caps, really: “MY DEAD HUSBAND TAUGHT ME A TECHNIQUE FOR FOLDING TOWELS I WILL NEVER FORGET.”

Off-list, Meredith came to me with an idea: A literary project devoted to these sacred daily gestures, the preserved and re-enacted memories of the dead through what they did with their hands while they were here. Thus was born Dead Housekeeping.

Which brings me back to The Paper Garden, and to my life as it was when I wrote this: my messy basement full of inherited and broken things, my paying projects beckoning, my sleeping family upstairs, my dead husband relentlessly still dead, my living husband very much alive…And meanwhile, too, the birds in my yard, the friends and colleagues and the contributors who have helped us breathe life into this project, their trust and enormous concentration toward telling the ways and habits of their loved ones, alive despite the unfairness of their loss…even so, sometimes, these we loved who cared for us do live again as we stir at our stoves or plump up a pillow or put on the music…meanwhile the messy, absorbing business of making home and keeping on, even in the face of such loss and such waste.

How? How can we live on? And how can we not?