A Regime of Small Kindnesses
A Regime of Small Kindnesses
Jen Pollock Michel
I still own my trade paperback copy of Marilyn Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping, which I read during my third year of university. There are no markings on the pages from that first reading. I suspect it made no real impression.
Looking back, I can see that the time was inopportune, that I was in-between losses. Two years earlier, when my healthy father had dropped dead in the garage, dressed in his overcoat with his briefcase beside him, the autopsy report had cited the cause of his death as a cardiac “event.” This is exactly as I had interpreted it at the time. Before the death of my brother, three years later, I did not think of grief as a chronic condition, but as something acute and irregular, something that could find an eventual resolution.
*
It is 2017, and I am filling my gas tank somewhere in the middle of Michigan. I’ve handed a wad of cash to my five children—“Sure, get some candy”—and verified that we are a little more than five hours from “home.” I absentmindedly trigger the pump, thinking of the house we’ve just bought in Toronto’s midtown. We are ending our liminal years, and it’s not entirely the relief I expect. I recite the address of our new home like a liturgy.
Since our move from Chicago to Toronto in 2011, we’ve found ourselves in-between places. My husband’s work brought us north, and we only planned on staying for three years. When we’d arranged to leave temporarily, we rented our suburban “brown house” (as the kids came to nostalgically call it) to friends and farmed out the piano, the barbecue, and the guest bed to travelers in need. My mother-in-law took our brick red sectional, with the drapes and coordinating throw pillows, for her own living room. These were some of the things we left behind—the things we won’t now retrieve.
*
In the years constituted by rent checks, both paid and collected, I picked up Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping again. This novel, with transience at its beating heart, had been packed and repacked every time I have changed the scenery of my life. Ironically, it now came to signal the durable and enduring.
In Housekeeping, Sylvie is the thirty-something aunt who returns to care for her sister’s children, Ruth and Lucille, in the wake of their serial losses: first, the suicide of their mother, then, five years later, the death of their grandmother. After Ruth and Lucille were deposited on their grandmother’s porch (with a box of graham crackers), their mother, Helen, drove her car over a cliff into the same lake where her father died in a train derailment. Ruth and Lucille’s grandmother assumed care for their girls until her death, at which time her spinster sisters reported for domestic duty. Quickly, these elderly sisters grow overwhelmed and start plotting their abdication to Sylvie, the drifter whom no one knows how to reach. Sylvie does not enjoy the reputation of someone “stable,” but Lily and Nona hypothesize that she may have “improved,” even that the responsibilities of home might be a means of ongoing improvement.
Davide Orrichio
At the center of Housekeeping is not simply a family in disrepair— but a house suffering neglect. In fact, the house symbolically stands in for the family, and the regimen of housekeeping for the dualities of welcome and abandonment, care and inattention. The house had been built by Lucille and Ruth’s grandfather, and in the wake of his death many years earlier, their grandmother had still managed the rites and rituals of the housekeeping for her then teenage daughters: “She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace. She knew a thousand songs. Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce.” When her girls crawled into starched sheets under warm quilts, they knew the feeling of being loved.
With their grandmother’s death and their aunt Sylvie’s arrival, orderliness, both in the family and in the house, recedes—and with it, the light itself. “Darkness is the only solvent,” Ruth eventually concludes, when she reflects on the degrading state of affairs. Sylvie is incapable of giving any kind of consistent care to the girls or to the house. She feeds Ruth and Lucille dinner in the dark: "The table would be set with watermelon pickles and canned meats, apples and jelly doughnuts and shoestring potatoes, a block of pre-sliced cheese, a bottle of milk, a bottle of catsup, and raisin bread in a stack.” When she does take up the housekeeping, it’s never with the regularity that the home demands. Her efforts are haphazard, fitful. She bleaches the tea towels for weeks. She washes half of the kitchen ceiling. She sweeps, only to leave most of the leaves and discarded papers in the corners of the kitchen, which are lifted every time the window blows. “Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie’s housekeeping.” The family splinters as crickets take up in the pantry, squirrels in the eaves, and sparrows in the attic.
When the sheriff threatens to take away custodial rights from Sylvie, she turns to the housekeeping as one last measure of hope. If only she could set the house in order. One morning, Ruth wakes to find evidence of her efforts: “The kitchen table was cleared and scrubbed and there was a bowl and a spoon and a box of cornflakes and a glass of orange juice and two pieces of buttered toast on a saucer and the vase of artificial daisies.” Sylvie attempts the performance of domestic virtue—but the housekeeping is not something to catch up on overnight. It requires constancy of care.
*
There are many reasons Robinson’s Housekeeping means far more to me now, twenty-odd years after my first reading. Like Robinson, who wrote the novel at night with her young boys tucked in bed, as a wife and mother, I, too, now have a life circumscribed by domestic responsibility.
Robinson’s novel tells the story of home as I’ve come to know it: not just the dishes, of course, but the losses. The losses that look like sudden calamitous events; the practiced losses of living a rootless, inattentive life. With the premature death of my father, followed years later by the suicide of brother, I came to know the world as an inhospitable place—and home as a mutable, tragic thing. But if I’ve lost home, I’ve also practiced losing it. I think of Sylvie, sleeping on top of the covers with her shoes on, her personal affairs stowed in a cardboard box beneath the bed, recognizing the hope in that detachment. Transience whispers a promise: at any moment, you can leave and improve your life, improve yourself. Better yet, it allows you to shirk the responsibilities you may have shouldered in the housekeeping.
Housekeeping bears witness to the sodden reality of life on this decaying planet—and also to our most sacred responsibilities to it. One might say, in fact, that it’s a treatise against the perils of acedia, that ancient vice of violent indifference, or lack of care. To fall into acedia, or sloth, is to surrender to a kind of gross and godless neglect. I fear we know this vice well—it keeps us on our couches, scrolling to spectate the world rather than participate in it.
Housekeeping urges us to care. It reminds us that this care involves everyday rites and rituals of love that we owe to our places: to our street, our neighbors, our view from the front window. As Robinson put it in her essay, “When I Was a Child,” “At a certain level, housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which, taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm.” This is not a word for fancifully imagining heroism. It’s a word to disabuse us of any notion that faithfulness will be measured in cosmic and extraordinary feats. No, the housekeeping signals humility, modesty of aspirations, and a commitment to the mundane. It won’t indulge any messianic impulses. Because the value of housekeeping is measured by regularity of attention.
*
It will perhaps seem strange to think that Housekeeping provides me with a vision for my work as Lead Editor with Imprint magazine, published by the Grace Centre for the Arts, a ministry arm of Grace Toronto Church. Although the not-for-profit magazine was being published at the time of our arrival in Toronto, after several members of its volunteer team moved away from the city, it fell unfortunately silent. I lamented its absence.
In 2016, I proposed to Ian Cusson, who then directed the Grace Centre for the Arts, that we relaunch Imprint after several years of hiatus. At the time, we planned simply to publish a special edition concurrent with the opening of our newly renovated building, the historic St. Andrew’s church located at the corners of Jarvis and Carlton Streets. It seemed an occasion to mark, both for the congregation and the city. In that special print issue, I wrote a piece about the history of the building and the congregations that had made it their home for more than a century, including members of the Estonian and Latvian congregants that had been made refugees during World War II. I didn’t intend anything more than one special edition of Imprint, but four years later (with an expanded volunteer team and an added online and social media presence), despite the challenges of the pandemic, we mailed more than 300 copies across North America of yet another print issue to interested readers.
Housekeeping is a word that addresses our commitment, as a publication, to the kind of comprehensibility that Robinson’s novel suggests is possible: “Everything must finally be made comprehensible.” Although we want to be clear-eyed about the disrepair of the world (because no reader outside of the church will stomach any willful looking away), at the same time, we want to bear good news, to remind our readers that grief is a short-term condition. This comprehensibility isn’t necessarily achieved by abstract explanation. We believe that beauty, that art, even that smooth, heavy-weighted paper that feels good in the hands of our readers, are their own kind of apologia. We look to tell true stories and tell them in a beautiful way.
Housekeeping is a word that also signals our commitment to our house, which is to say our city. In every poem, reported piece, and personal essay we publish, we want to be particularly attuned to the longings and losses of the people who walk the streets of Toronto. We are cognizant of our responsibility to engage with these neighbors as interesting human beings with many shared loves, many common curiosities. Imprint, then, is a practice of being a church in the city, for the city.
There are days, of course, that the work of Imprint feels exactly like the Saturday chores. There are emails and spreadsheets, Slack messages and (in this era) Zoom calls, all of which beg for attention in the middle of lives otherwise occupied. Like the housekeeping, our work is unpaid and often invisible. But as it creates opportunity for creatives within our congregation to cultivate their gifts, we hope it makes our corner of the world a little bit more lovely, a little bit more livable.
Housekeeping, as a word, signals a vision of responsibility in the world: a response to God that calls us to unobvious, ordinary, regular acts of love. In Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son, Nouwen explores the lessons of housekeeping in his famous parable of the lost brother. Nouwen explains that for many years, he’d read that story, imagining himself in the role of the brothers: the younger brother and the hungry search for the distant country; the older brother and the seething, self-righteous sense of responsibility. But there was a new way in which Nouwen began to read the story, and it seated him at the head of the table, assigning him the fatherly role of welcome. In other words, Nouwen saw himself, for the first time, as commissioned with the work of setting the table and serving the guests.
To take up the housekeeping is to imitate the constancy of God’s care.
Jen Pollock Michel
Author & Editor
Jen is the author of A Habit Called Faith, Surprised by Paradox, Keeping Place & Teach Us to Want
Photography by Luis González
