In the mountains, spring cleaning is not merely a phrase. In order to create traction the roads are coated with sand, which of course mixes with the snow and becomes part of the coloration of one’s boots and automobile for the length of winter. I am always amazed at how my boots manage to discolor the trails around my house, despite the fact that I don’t think I spend much time walking on the roads or in parking lots; but I must, because I spread sand all over my life for months at a time: in my cabin, in stores I go to, houses I visit, I leave behind dirty little puddles. And that’s the least of it. This winter, I burned a cord of wood. That is a very moderate amount, all things considered; many of my neighbors, with larger houses, will burn seven or eight. But even a single cord of wood is about two tons. So two tons of material went through my house, armful by armful, and not only did I track in dirt each of those times, but the wood itself is hardly clean. Leaves and grass stick to it; sawdust has frozen onto it; bits of bark and tiny chips of wood flake off it. I harvest the bark off the wood once it’s indoors before burning it (bark makes a superior water-retentive weed-proof mulch, which saves me a great deal of labor watering and weeding), and bark removal is never an entirely clean operation. All this detritus ends up in the cabin.
It doesn’t just end up on the floor, which would make sense. A coating of dust gets on everything. How so much can accumulate never ceases to amaze me. I really don’t know where it all comes from. Every time I scoop the ash out of the wood stove, I know some becomes airborne, so that is a factor; the tracked-in dirt I have already mentioned must get into the air a bit too; we human beings are supposedly constantly shedding skin, and it is certainly true that we spend more hours indoors during the winter, so I guess that must be part of it; but it seems that no object not in constant use can make it to April without needing a serious dusting.
The best way to do this cleaning is to wait for a beautiful, warm spring day, and bring each object outside, and brush it off with a featherduster, letting it get a little sun, just to see what it looks like outdoors, and then bringing it back in and taking the next piece out. But I did my spring cleaning this year on the 19th of March, and spending much time outdoors was not a pleasant option. It was still cold – terribly cold, twenty degrees in the daytime and five degrees at night – when I did my spring cleaning. My schedule forced me.
On March 25th – old New Year’s Day – my bachelor life will end, and I will be getting married. After a brief honeymoon in the Smokies, my new wife and I will return to the cabin and start life together here. Of course there is no way of avoiding the fact that she will have to deal with the dust and imperfections of my life, but the best introduction to reality is a gradual one, and I thought I would try to clean up my act as much as I could before she arrived. So I went through old papers that had accumulated in the cabin, ran a duster over just about everything, sorted through seeds I had gathered but never planted in all these years (to the compost went the less desirable ones: maybe they’ll come up in my garden in future years), got on my hands and knees and scrubbed the floor, turned old rotted clothes into fuel or rags, and as always seems to be the case in winter, removed pounds of dust and dirt from the inside of the cabin and put it back outside to start the dust cycle all over again (the domestic Sisyphean equivalent of the “water cycle”).
When it was as clean as it was going to get, I snowshoed a bag of garbage and a bag of recycling out to the road, and then went back to get some things. I needed a lot of stuff: camping equipment for our honeymoon in the Smokies, plant ID guides for the same trip, formal attire for the wedding, clothes for a wide range of temperatures, a second pair of snowshoes so Catherine could get in to the cabin, when she arrived, things like that. On subsequent trips I also removed from the cabin some excess books and clothes and things, so that there would be room for her possessions, when she arrived with them.
When I returned for what I knew would be my last trip, I found myself suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. Some of it was the look of the cabin – I actually don’t like tidiness very much, it feels like a denial of process, it makes things look finished, as if there is no life going on. But of course it was much more than that. Cleaning is a ritual, and like all rituals it has meaning and symbolic power. It is an attempt to put an end to something, and to make room for something else. Now the cleaning was finished. But the tidiness was only a ritual tidiness. Things had been stuffed into drawers and swept discreetly out of sight. It looked a bit like a lie. We never get a truly clean start.
And of course I wasn’t looking for a clean start. I was looking for transformation. And I have no doubt it will come. Things do not remain the same. And I have long wanted change now – have known that it is necessary, and pushed for it. But now that I was stepping into the threshold, I could see what I was leaving behind.
Seven years – I had spent seven years alone at the cabin. During all that time I never really had a companion – no one ever shared my life in any substantive way. All I had were visitors, and they were few and far between. One of my male friends made a few trips up, and had a toothbrush in my toothbrush-cup, but I think that was only because he forgot it. I had spent a lot of time alone – a lot of time alone. Seven years – already it sounded mythical, already it was feeling less than real. For seven years, if I returned to the cabin and found something somewhere I hadn’t put it, it was because an animal had moved it, and I got so sensitive to where things were, I would always notice, and then go look for other signs of the animals. It was only me and them and God, though of course when you spend time in the wilderness, “me and them and God” becomes a kind of blur, a hendiatreis, where you become aware that you are saying only one thing, no matter how many “ands” you put in between its syllables.
Seven years alone. In such a time you become a kind of expert on being alone, in all its forms: aloneness, loneliness, solitude, solitariness, singleness, isolation, you name it. I am clearly capable of being alone, but I’m not, I don’t think, much of a loner. My greatest desire is always to share things. I have just been doing something that no one I knew wanted, or really could, share.
As I stood there in the cabin, the last things I needed in my pack, I started crying – I just couldn’t help myself – thinking of all the days and all the nights, the accumulation of all those experiences, the coming into being and now slipping away from me, of so much of what I call my life, here, in this one tiny little room on this one solitary mountain.
I don’t even know why we cry at such moments – I can only say that we do, and that when I do cry like that, I feel close to the mystery of being alive – the mystery of time, the mystery of feeling the river-water slip on past your fingers. We writers always want to catch this mystery, knowing that all the worthy successes in the field are here. How many times had I sat in this cabin, thrilled with some beauty, or dejected by some disappointment, and ached – ached – for someone to share it with. How many days had I shaped in perfect freedom here, doing as I wished, writing and thinking and observing, chopping wood and carrying water, dreaming at night and watching the sun rise in the morning. How I longed to know it all, to let no tree grow here without my knowing it well; how I longed that someday my children would learn the stars lying on this grass, which I had sown with my hands. How I longed that mine would not be the only life to know this place. I remember one night when out visiting friends I returned to my property and parked by the road to begin the quarter-mile walk across the stream to the cabin. I realized I had forgotten my flashlight. No matter: I knew the way in the dark. I had done it many times before. But as I trudged on in the blackness, I caught a glimpse of light up ahead of me. What was that? A star on the horizon? No, it was a light at my cabin. This was strange. Was someone there? As I got closer I saw it was a candle in the window – I had left it burning there by accident. And I realized it was the most animated, welcoming thing I had come home to in seven years. Every other time it had been merely dark and cold when I got home. The fact that I was aware of this – the fact that I experienced that moment in this way – meant that it was time for something different.
And now – now, something different begins. After the wedding, I will return to work at the nursery and Catherine will work in the garden, and so this life I have begun here will continue. But it will not be the same, I am sure. And so I cried there before the hearth I had designed, and the stove my father used to tend when I was a child, and knelt before it, overwhelmed by the sense of a God more inner than the inmost thing I could find inside me, and whom I had as yet not even begun to know, a God so near, but always slipping away, whenever we close our hands to keep.
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