Monday’s Writer’s Almanac featured a Mark Strand poem that I really liked, with the love/tepid relationship with cooking and cleaning that I have. (I like to eat and I love a clean house, but sometimes I get so tired of providing food and order.) (My budget doesn’t allow for restaurants. Or a maid. Someday.)
But this elevated things, if only momentarily. From “The Continuous Life“:
…O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed.