Dusting and blessing

I don't like to dust. Sometimes I am in the mood to clean but I never like the dusting part.

Dusting reminds me of how much stuff I have, always too much.  Dusting reminds me of repetitive childhood duties. I  had to dust the furniture every Saturday morning and I can remember every despised rung of every chair. Dusting reminds me of entropy; there is always more dust even an hour later. And unlike bigger cleaning jobs like floors and kitchens, the results of dusting don't really show unless you've put it off way too long.

This morning I applied my personal remedy for impatience with necessary tasks like dusting: take it slow. I think of it as moving through the house or task at my mother's pace. She was slow and methodical, a one-thing-at-a-time person, not a multitasker. So I started dusting slowly and as I did this a practice came to mind.
In An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor recommends the practice of pronouncing blessings. How do you do this and why? Just try it, she says, and you will see. "Start with anything you like. Even a stick lying on the ground will do."

And so I found myself caressing the sticks of my furniture with the dustcloth, paying attention to each item, remembering their stories, and blessing them.

Bless you, oh second-hand cabinet, for catching the mail on your top and concealing the VCR tapes so we don't have to decide whether to throw them out.

Bless you, small table crafted by my husband's teenage hands in the high school woodworking class, and bless the stains on your top because there was, blessedly, no polyurethane back then.

Blessings on the eight matching chairs we bought when we decided it was time to buy real furniture, and blessings on your leather seats, scratched by the kittens who came into our household in 1994. And bless Lalo, who is still with us.

Bless each turtle in my collection and bless each friend who noticed that I have a thing about turtles and gave me one.

Bless the mysterious photo of the river baptism and the memory of the trip to New Orleans where we found it.

Bless the sills of this window that looks out onto the hummingbird feeder.

Bless the piles of deferred decisions sitting on my desk.

Bless the oak china cabinet that once towered in my grandmother's house and all of the lessons and tools of hospitality that it holds. 

Bless the nesting tables from Pakistan and the nesting dolls from Russia and the stone wolf shaman from Alaska and the beaten copper picture from the trip on the motor scooter to the mining district outside of Lubumbashi, Congo when we were very young.

Before long I was even blessing the dust, which filters into the house from the trees and soil and rises as ash from the woodstove and sheds from Lalo's fine fur and our own dry winter skins.

And in this way I gained patience for the necessary and repetitive task of dusting and I, myself, was blessed.