When I had graduated from my undergraduate studies at Ohio University, my Dad asked if I would go to Vancouver, Washington and spend the summer before my French grad program started up to stay with his baby sister. My Aunt Trudy had two little girls at home, she worked a full time job at the forest service, had her own massage therapy business, was going through a divorce, and was preparing for significant brain surgery near the end of the summer. A full plate hardly captures the essence of what she was navigating and he wanted to help her so he had me go in his place. It was my absolute honor even if I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, what I was supposed to do, or what was coming. Nevertheless, my auntie made sure we had fun trips with the girls. We went to visit my auntie in Bend. We went boating with my sister’s family and Aunt Trudy showed her girls that yes, even their mama was willing to go tubing behind the boat. Aside from the less-than-pleasant interludes dealing with her soon-to-be-ex, most of that summer was really good.
I remember I read some of her vampire novels and started having terrible nightmares while there. The deadpan delivery of her “maybe you shouldn’t read those anymore” will live in my humor center forever. Yeah. Maybe I shouldn’t. HA!
As the time for her surgery arrived, I took her girls to the bead store while everyone else accompanied my auntie to the hospital. Later that day, my cousin had to deliver some pretty devastating news and she did it with more grace than I could have mustered at that time. Aunt Trudy’s surgery didn’t go exactly as intended. In the process of removing a tumor, she had a bleed they didn’t anticipate and couldn’t quite control easily. The ramifications were that she had to be put into a medically induced coma until the swelling could come down and the longterm effects were as though she had suffered a stroke. That first evening and the immediate days following were some of the most brutally painful I had experienced up until then. What we had expected had gone to the wayside and a new reality confronted us.
I remember one instance where I felt so untethered I needed something to do with my pent-up energy. I remember scrubbing her kitchen floor. That was the first time the act of a menial task as release crystallized. I could not control the situation. I could not control the outcome. I could control for that one moment how clean the floor was. Now before you get all worried that I Joan Crawford-ed things a la Mommie Dearest, do not fret. It was a one-time thing.
But the lesson of the gift of menial tasks remained. Flash forward to the last several years. I have been working on the river rock and black plastic removal around the Newell house, taking it in sections. Could we have chucked it all into the back of the pick-up and taken it to the landfill in a day or two? Sure. But I deliberately asked Bryan if this could please be my thing. I have hand-picked rocks, sifting through nails and chunks of concrete, bugs, any number of gross things. I can also tell you that this meditative, laborious act has been a gift. I cannot control the Supreme Court. I cannot control climate, plague, war. I cannot make someone who I love very much who is very sick become well again. I cannot make anyone love me who doesn’t. I cannot control the outcome.
In the meditation that comes with menial tasks is the knowledge that no, we cannot control the outcome, but we can contribute to the process. And we get to choose our response to the outcome. There is tremendous free will and power there.
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Feryl Files 