Reflections on the Eighth Week of Winter – Nonviolent Toilet Cleaning

Legacy of Love on the Opened Bed

     Monday night, I snuggled under three layers of covers and read Arun Gandhi’s Legacy of Love in a circle of light from my reading lamp. I expected an inspiring story, like the incident of Arun throwing his pencil stub into the bushes and asking his grandfather for a new pencil. Arun got a flashlight for a two-hour search in the dark to retrieve the stub because Mahatma Gandhi considered waste a form of passive violence.

    Like Arun, I didn’t get what I expected. Instead, Arun offered the reason why bile rose in my throat on a sunny summer day in 1957.

    I’d finished third grade and, like the good girl Mom expected, kept my mouth shut while waiting for her to talk with a Realtor on a sidewalk in suburban Pittsburgh.

    The Realtor, wife of one of Dad’s co-workers at Cyclops Steel, waved purple fingernails past her creamy white face toward the house she’d showed Mom for our move from Titusville.

    Mom, who baked three pies and one cake a week in addition to sewing clothes for three children, squinted at the house then turned to the Realtor. “Why are you working, Phyllis? Chuck makes a good salary.”

   Mom’s homemade cotton shirtwaist swayed in the breeze.

   The Realtor’s straight skirt didn’t. Her chest pushed against a fitted suit coat. “Any [n-word] can clean a house.”

    Mom covered her mouth and chuckled.

    Bile rose in my throat. I turned away, watched a squirrel flick its tail, and swallowed hard.

    Why did the Realtor consider herself better than cleaners? All people were created equal–-the Presbyterian Church and the Declaration of Independence said so. I shivered, ignored the rest of the adult conversation, and silently resolved never to hire anyone to clean my house.

    More that sixty years passed.

    Each time I cleaned house, I recalled the Realtor’s six caustic words.

    I never hired a cleaner.

    And snuggled under the covers this past Monday night, I read page ninety in Arun’s memoir— “The untouchables . . . employed to empty buckets of ‘night soil’ . . . forced into life of poverty . . . and social oppression.”

    Aha!

    The passive violence of the 1957 words had caused bile to rise in my throat. The Realtor conveyed lack of respect, lack of humility, and support for institutions that oppress people rather than offer a pathway out of poverty.

    So Wednesday, like I’d done innumerable times in forty-nine and a half years of marriage, I dressed in too-stained-for-meeting-people clothes, reached under the kitchen sink for rags, and pulled the hand broom, dust pan, and dust mop from beside the linen closet. In a celebratory mood, I attacked dirt and detritus because cleaning practiced humility, respect, and nonviolence.

    Well, mostly nonviolence.

    Cleaning the great room while Spence works on his sofa-desk, rather than rides his tractor or saves children from lead poisoning in Cleveland, requires a little finesse.

    “Will you move to the chair by the door?” I waved a rag in that direction.

    He moved.

    I shook the sofa cover, dusted the coffee table, and crawled to reach under the furniture with the hand broom. Achoo.

    After mopping the back half of the room, I knelt beside a pile of cat hair and bits of firewood bark. “I need you to walk around the back of my chair,” I paused to point with my finger and draw an arc with my arm, “and to the sofa. DON’T go by the fireplace.”

    Okay. That don’t violated nonviolence practice, but he moved again.

    Sneezes and the dust mop handle banging to the floor broke Spence’s attention several times. “Are you being careful?”

    A half hour later, I’d dusted, swept, and mopped all the great room dirt and detritus to one spot–between the end of the sofa and the kitchen counter.

    Spence pulled his feet off the coffee table. “I need to be in the kitchen, but . . .”

    I leaned forward to guard the last dust pile. “You can go if you walk past the sliding glass door and wood stove then behind my side of the kitchen table.”

    Spence lifted his feet to the coffee table. “I can wait.”

    “It’s okay.” I swept dirt and detritus into the dust pan. “I only have this last spot to finish.”

    He didn’t move. “While you have that broom in your hand, I’m on my best behavior.”

    I did move. I traipsed to the first floor bathroom–no conflict since we have another facility in the basement. When I squirted Soft Scrub over the toilet tank, fragrance of lemon tickled my nose.

    Stench of feces had filled noses of untouchables who carried leaky buckets of human waste on their heads.

    My toilet brush scritch-scratched stains off the bowl.

    Untouchables emptied buckets of waste onto fields.

    I hugged the cool porcelain to reach the back of the toilet bottom.

    Untouchables scrubbed fowl buckets.

    My nonviolent toilet cleaning didn’t seem courageous compared to the untouchables’ job, but I wasn’t oppressing, humiliating, or disrespecting anyone.

    Keeping my resolution to clean my own house won’t last forever. A time will come when I can’t crawl on my knees for toilet scrubbing or sweeping under the sofa. I’ll need help from a person physically more adept. With gratitude and respect, I’ll ask a cleaner to do a job I’m not capable of doing.

   Until then, it’s nonviolent toilet cleaning for me.

Clean Toilet