A Ritual Ablution

...and a clean carpet as well.

We have a cream-colored carpet in our living room. That's nice, because it brings sunlight deeper into the room than a dark carpet would have done.

But light-colored carpets do show almost everything that gets dragged across it, spilled on it, or ground into it. And our carpet is no exception.

Cleaning the carpet is my job. Deb handles all sorts of cleaning and straightening projects around the house, but wrestling with the carpet cleaner is my assignment.

During my illness and treatment last year, I couldn't even consider renting the carpet cleaner to do the carpet. I just no energy for such exertion. (But looking back on this is a valuable reminder to me: yes, I was that weak...) And as a result -- as the seasons came and went -- the carpet picked up a wide variety of stains. Coffee, tea, dirt tracked in from outside, and goodness-knows-what-all else.

So today was the day I decided to tackle this project. My strength is almost back to normal (although my stamina still has a considerable way to go...) and there was this opening in my schedule. So I sprinted off to Home Depot at 7:00 this morning, got the beast, brought it home, and got the job done. In fact, I went over numerous areas of the carpet two, three, or even four times.

It's still wet, so we don't know exactly how it will look when it's ready for use again. But at the moment, it looks wonderful.

And as I was cleaning, it occurred to me that every time I'd looked at the stains on the carpet, it reminded me of last year's treatments and my incapacities. And the stains themselves became a metaphor for the tumors that had been and those that might still be.

And they're gone. The stains, that is. I have an MRI in a few weeks to help confirm that the tumor situation is as clean as the carpet is now.

I still have anxieties to wrestle with. Fears to deal with. They come and go -- like the tides, like the breeze -- and I feel as incapable of dealing with them as I do trying to control the tides or the breeze.

But for the moment, our carpet is clean and I feel strong and healthy.