This afternoon I decided to clean out my laundry room. In recent months it had become a dumping ground for cardboard packaging, returnable bottles, clothing, canned vegetables and promotional gifts. I could live with that quite well, just squeezing through discarded furniture, winter coats, spare ironing boards, badminton rackets, the Madocke and boxes full of CDs when I wanted to do laundry, but at a certain point when I visited I started to fear that they would accidentally open the door and be buried in an avalanche of old newspapers, laundry and cables from devices that no longer worked. The excavation work would take days and then it was questionable whether they would come out of the rubble alive.
So I went into the cage, of course with a flashlight because the dusty bulb that could still provide a little light had given up the ghost months ago. Clear out first, I thought, and began to organize neat piles in my hallway, finding things I’d long forgotten belonged to me, like an archery trophy, a payment request from DUO, and a dress that looked great on me three dress sizes ago.
While the sun shone outside, I plodded on through a twilight world. The space seemed to grow with everything I took away, I didn’t know I had so much space, seemed to pay less and less rent per square foot.
As I dragged out the second broken vacuum cleaner, I thought of an acquaintance who always says that tidying up is so good for the mind. To me, it’s more of a sign that that spirit is already doing well. Only then do I have the energy to clean the less visible areas of my house, so that there is finally no chaos hiding under sofas, beds or in the back of cupboards.
So I crawled further through the room while behind me the hallway merrily silted up. The latter was not bad, because behind us everything silts up again sooner or later. It’s about thinking you’re moving forward and booking small moments of overview. That’s how you keep moving things over and over, both inside and outside your head, on one of those random and sunny Wednesday afternoons in the universe, face shiny and gray with sweat and dirt. Stubbornly believing that you’re having a good time, there under the broken light, in the completely dusty dark.
Ellen Deckwitz writes an exchange column with Marcel van Roosmalen here.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on July 20, 2023.