Dead Letter Department #67

weather report

Mostly I’ve been catching up: chores, work, piles of things around the house. I’ve also been watching a lot of TikTok videos, largely in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, on cleaning (#aestheticcleaning, #sundayreset), which has really brought home just how very many previously unknown filters & crevices & corners I usually ignore. The garage has been the biggest (& dirtiest) piece. When the house got painted this spring, the power-washing beforehand revealed that the bottom of the door had rotted away to the point that sunlight was visible through it, and needed to be replaced, but of course having a separate room outside of my teensy apartment where things can be dumped means I’ve done just that, & every stray stick of furniture not currently in use & boxes of antique china I may never eat off of was piled up in an intimidating jumble.

I spent a few hours doing yard work at my sibling’s place last weekend, which made me feel like I was finally healed enough post-surgery to tackle this mess, and do you want to know how long it took me to clear the whole pile out & get it staged for the garage door replacement? 45 minutes. This shit has been on my list for months, hanging over me as a spidery, sweaty chore of dread, and I knocked the whole project out in less than hour after work on Monday. There’s still the dump run & various items to redistribute on Facebook, but really, 45 minutes? I probably spent longer than that diligently writing it onto my chore list every week for the past four months. There’s a literal list of things like that, stuff I can’t quite seem to tackle, even though I know I should.

I’m a big fan of KC Davis’s work on neurodiversity (XXX on TikTok): she’s a therapist, former divinity student (!) & author who addresses how to make your home work for you when you struggle with various care tasks. I checked Davis’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning, out of the library, & there was a colossal wait for it, so clearly I’m among an adoring throng of those who are finding her work helpful. So far I really like it: it is extremely kind, in a way that other housekeeping books I’ve read don’t manage.

One of the main takeaways for me has been the concept that chores are morally neutral. It’s possible to build a scaffolding of systems to help yourself get necessary things done, but she also helps you to identify the internal judgements that go along with fighting to complete things that seem to come easily to other people. My environment is usually reasonably clean, but I always have a giant pile of tasks & paperwork & correspondence to tackle, which inevitably makes me feel like if I was a somewhat better person I’d have this all in hand. Emails would be answered promptly, my catch-all notebook would look more like one of those bullet journal layouts instead of an indecipherable scrawl, and meal planning would involve more vegetables & fewer nights bleakly contemplating the desiccated wasteland of my freezer.

At my last office job, I was telling a friend about the long list of shit I needed to get done that night, and she stopped me. “Are you going to get to the end of your life & wish you’d cleaned more?”

I laughed it off at the time, & said yes I probably would wish that, because really the dishes were a problem that day, & I was embarrassed about it, but it stuck with me, the way those little revelations other people try to offer you sometimes do. I don’t judge other people for their homes, for the ways they wrestle with this frequently gross, sticky, embodied existence, but for some reason the places where I fall down on the job seem to be glowing neon signs of my abject failure to function as an adult. Not that childhood was better—I’m not at all nostalgic for it, and was just as bad at big chunks of the work of being a kid, too. The idea that my loose grip on all of this is, according to KC Davis, morally neutral and therefore just a factor to accommodate is definitely something I’ll be thinking about.

Other non-cleaning related reading the past month has included Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s The Hidden Life of Dogs (an anthropologist’s study of her own dog pack), Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cetaganda (Miles Vorkosgian is my new fictional obsession), Joan Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean, & the collection of the last interviews she gave, which I have been talking about non-stop. Didion is always sharpening for me, the precision of her language, her almost alien, angular view of what she’s observing and reporting back to us.

one good thing

This was a cake birthday. There are quite a few good bakeries in town: Pure Bliss for fancy stuff, Ashuri for baklava, Narrative for perfect chocolate chip cookies, but I wanted CAKE cake, so I went & got a piece of everything Slice of Heaven had in the case so we could try all of it. There was chocolate, which was exactly what it should be, towering & rich, vanilla with caramel apples & a layer of cheesecake in between, tiramisu, & carrot cake. It was a delightful few days, trying a bit of each after dinner each night. Leaving the Days of Cake behind once I went back to workaday life was feeling a little sad, but when I got to Portland my sibling had procured for us the ultimate in pretty little indulgences: petit fours! I hadn’t had a petit four in years. They were so pretty, & the best little holiday reprise.

Thank you for reading. If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may someone arrive with a petit four at the most unexpected moment.