purification ovenbird While my parents are stuck in air travel limbo on their way to Vancouver for Christmas I spend the day cleaning the house. It’s a nervous tic passed down from my mother, who was also possessed by a frantic need to deep clean everything if she thought someone was coming over. As a child I watched her scrubbing the bathtub with Ajax, kneeling on the floor in a pair of old shorts discoloured by bleach. I always said, “no one cares if the house is spotless!” but she never listened. I didn’t get it then, but I get it now. It’s not the house that needs to be clean, it’s me. I need to prove, through gleaming sinks and freshly washed towels, that I am whole and undamaged. Behold! Life has not yet taken the gold plating from my soul! You can tell because I washed the floors and scoured the countertops. See how the stove is as white as the wings of an angel? This is how I keep my promises to a nonexistent god. I purify myself with baking soda and a stiff brush. I peel the sin from my hands with peroxide. I lash myself with vinegar. I whisper my confessions to the obscured face of the vacuum cleaner and emerge in the evening red and raw and shining. When I pick up my parents from the airport I will usher them into the dustless shrine of my home so they can see that their efforts in raising me were not in vain. This illusion will last until breakfast tomorrow when the sink will again be full of dishes and the floors will be sticky and we will all set ourselves to the work of loving each other, loudly and messily and imperfectly. 251216 what's it to you? who go blather from