I kneel down to hang the washing up. It’s a change in routine.
Gone are the days of hanging washing over the bannisters – now it’s a couple of free-standing clothes dryers, near the windows at the front.
Not the stuff of excitement. (Not yet. Keep going.)
I don’t do loads of kneeling down, I have to say. Bending down to pick up random items from the carpet – yes. But there is something faith-related that stirs when I kneel down.
I don’t do lots of praying kneeling down either. Praying, yes, different places, often when I’m walking along. Kneeling to pray – it’s less familiar.
But here I am, most days, kneeling down before the two new windows, hanging up the washing. Bending over my family, as it were, as I hang out the clothes.
One clothes airer has low rungs. That’s why I kneel. Plus it’s easier for getting clothes out of the washing bag to hang up. And while I’m there, I can gaze up at the sky too, through those skylight windows.
I’ve read a few blog posts, off and on, about the place of motherhood as one where your home is your church – or perhaps your monastery. Day by day, you do your tasks, often bound by time if not by chapel bells.
(Getting tea on the table for half-five. That’s one of them. Some days, I’d rather like a peal of bells to signal the achievement.)
So far, I’ve nodded, thought about it for a bit, moved on to the next item on the to do list.
Tonight, it hits me. Hanging up the washing is mundane, thankless, not worthy of mention – however you term it. But a family doesn’t keep going that long without some clean clothes. (Feel free to write in and say if you do, though.)
But hanging up the washing – here is where I kneel. I can be in the moment. I can look at the sky, the light, the seagulls overhead.
I can look at the clothes, the big, the medium and the small, and realise that I will not always be hanging up clothes in these sizes.
I can kneel, too, and wonder about the combination of T S Eliot, and a post about the everyday tasks of life. There is plenty of everyday in his poem – and plenty of wonder too.
I kneel down to hang up the washing, and discover them both there – the everyday, and the wonder, wrapped around each other like the clothes in the washing bag.