When Yours Becomes Mine

This is my workspace. It is in the kitchen, fast against the five-burner, turbo-charged gas stove (on my left). I can fire up the burner to heat water for tea without even getting up.

Out the window this morning I can see almost 2 dozen chimneys chugging away, puffing out smoke, struggling against this frigid winter's day. (It is 12 degrees now, much warmer than the -3 when I awoke.)

A small flock of pigeons have taken up housekeeping on a chimney just to the west of us. When it is particularly cold, they tend to perch atop the chimney's bricks, plunging into the shimmering heat of the building's exhaust, an avian version of a shvitz, I suppose. One nesting pair seems to have won prime perching rights there. The others hang out on the peak of the steeply sloped roof, catching the remnants of the heat escaping from the attic.

But here is the point: The first night we were in the apartment, I set to cleaning. Not that the owner hadn't done a credible job. Okay, there were some places that needed help. But even if there weren't, I would have cleaned anyway. I cleaned to transform the sense of place; to mark it as mine, to strip it of past associations, recreate it so that it was no longer hers but ours. The ritual act of cleaning can do that. With the right attitude (and social structure), to clean is to claim (this doesn't work as well if you are the hired help).

Whatever dirt I found that first night, I could disown. It was clearly not of my making, not my fault, not my responsibility. If anyone came in that night, or the next day, or perhaps even the next day, and saw those crumbs, that shmutz, that grease, they would know I was innocent, a victim of random grime. That it is not emblematic of how I live or keep house.

But then, today, as I bent down to wipe some newly spilled sugar granules off the floor, I noticed dirt encrusted in a place I had missed that first day. And suddenly, the question arose, whose dirt is it now?

If someone comes to visit and sees that dirt, five days into my residency, can I still disclaim it, still not be embarrassed by its presence? To whom will my visitors (silently, of course) assign ownership and responsibility? Will they still defer guilt to the maker of the grime, or, given how long it has been under my jurisdiction, will they extend that guilt to me?

Which leads to the larger question: at what point in time, after how many days or weeks or months or years can we no longer disown the presence in the world of mess, disorder, pollution, injustice, selfishness, inequity and the structures and values that lead to them? At what point do the injustices that we did not create become ours because we do not work to right them, or the mistakes of the past become ours because we do not work to fix them?

At what point in our personal lives must we take ownership of who we are, regardless of what was done to us in the past, and strive to be better? At what point do we stand up and say that how we got here does not fully limit where we can yet go?

At what point in our political lives do we lay claim to society's wrongs that we have inherited and say the burden to clean them up is now ours, for if we don't, the guilt for allowing them to continue will be ours too.

At what point, then, does the past's behavior, the past's wrongs, become mine?

That question is too urgent. I am off to clean up that shmutz.