A small step at home

How old am I? I’m this old: Old enough that I spent the bulk of my weekend cleaning and re-arranging our kitchen, and old enough that having done so made me happier than anything I’ve done in the last, well, I don’t even know how long.

We’ve been a bit under a cloud here on The Hill. Physically we’re fine; we’ve avoided the dread disease up to this point, and taking all feasible measures to keep doing so. We didn’t travel for the holidays, so no real stress there.

But there was a cloud, and there was debris from the stay-at-home holiday. (So. Many. Boxes.) So I got out the cleaning supplies and sponges and towels and moved everything from the countertops and put most of it back in different places.

Yes, I’m writing about cleaning my kitchen. There is a larger point here.

So much is going on that we can’t control. We can’t control the dread disease. We can’t effect immediate change on the political situation. I can’t solve, on a macro level, the challenges faced by health-care workers and by parents and by health-care workers who are parents as the dread disease continues to mutate and variate. I can’t imagine the stress parents are under right now, with school starting after the holidays and so many damn decisions to be made, at least a few of which could be wrong.

I can’t change the world, at least not by myself.

I can clean and rearrange my kitchen to help make my corner of the world a little better.

I write this mostly to say: It worked. It’s a tangible accomplishment. It has, very briefly and very immediately, changed my world. I’ve started the year off with something positive on which to build. Don’t underestimate little victories.