Brooms and Buckets
As I parked my bike in its usual spot in the courtyard, I smelled a terrible smell. Gathering up my groceries from the bike basket, I noticed the smell increasing as I walked to the door of our building. That’s when I saw the source of the stench: a long smeared trail of fecal matter — forgive me, reader: it smelled human, not animal — stretching long from the sidewalk, across the covered cobblestone driveway and building entrance, deep into the central courtyard. Cars coming in and out of the driveway had tracked and smeared it in traceable lines. In a vehicle, it would have been easy to miss. On foot and bike, it was impossible to avoid.
Two men were in the courtyard, moving office furniture in and out of the building to a car they had parked there. Their car’s tires were smeared. They had propped the front doors of the building wide open, and so the stench was also wafting into the building, and they were likely inadvertently tracking it into the building as they moved furniture out to their car. The smell was putrid and intense; the evidence was manifest.
Every sense in me groaned as I carried the canvas bags of our family’s groceries to carry in, trying to avoid all the mess. The whole scene was unsettling and demoralizing. Oddly, I felt a twinge of fear. Something needed to be done, and no one was doing it.
After I got the groceries stored, I started filling a bucket with hot water and dish-soap water. I grabbed a slender bottle of vinegar, slipped on my yellow rubber boots, and headed back out to battle with the basics. It was in my interest but also for others. The common space was already violated, and it had already suffered from hours of low-grade neglect. Basic human sense — smell, visuals — demanded that someone, anyone, move towards the problem.
The cobblestones helped make it less terrible a task. European cities don’t invest in cobblestone because it is charming and quaint but also functional and sensible. Cobblestones offer porosity that vast stretches of macadam and concrete don’t. They better balance the natural world and human need, without allowing one to swallow up the other fully. But with many of them covered by roof on the driveway, they would never get reached by a cleansing rain. The stones had to be washed.
It took many bucketfuls of hot, soapy water and bottles of vinegar as well to begin to see and smell improvement. Repeatedly, I went in and out of our dwelling, removing my boots at the door, refilling my bucket with soap and hot water, putting my boots back on, and heading out to pour upon the desecrated cobblestones until it was also sufficiently diluted. A lime-scented soapy froth remained on the stones like sea foam as the waste material was slowly diluted and washed into the sandy material binding the cobblestones. The stench started to improve.
It wasn’t perfect. I didn’t have the courage to tackle the remaining pile that remained at the head of the driveway, but my small efforts of care began to seep into the carelessness. I chatted with the movers, who acknowledged it was gross. I texted a neighbor to warn her to be careful as she came home later that night. She thanked me for doing what I did, and expressed worry too. “So many strange things seem to be happening. Thanks for letting me know and trying to help.”
I think often about the Ukrainians, often women, some men, who waged their own low-grade resistance with brooms in the early days of that conflict, sweeping shards of glass and debris from sidewalks after bombings. I remember an article from the Syrian civil war about rubber boot-wearing men washing cars, which first struck me as outlandish when I read it but which grew as evidence of human sanity. Ordinary people, like living cobblestones, making small efforts to keep the dust of destruction held back, sweeping glass shards to protect vulnerable others, taking up the peaceful tools of human co-responsibility: plowshares, buckets, brooms. Exercising the freedom that is available to them, even when one can smell and see the threats to it.
There are many stupid fantasies that accompany the rumors and realities of war; only the most brutal and cruel revel in its brutalizing spoils, indulge in its benighted fog, even as the stench and ruinous evidence mount. Most who are forced to live through war know what an ignoble, degrading, and rusty blade it is, how muddy, debasing, and mean it is. How it hacks dully and dimly at bodies and the bodies of bodies.
I don’t know war at all, but I have seen and heard how some wage with its dust, grit, and silt, with buckets and brooms to real effect.
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It was a pleasure last fall to converse with Dr. Madeleine Pennington at Theos, a London-based think tank that researches, publishes, and contributes careful thought on religion and contemporary society for Theos’s larger Motherhood vs. The Machine project and podcast, hosted by Theos Director Chine McDonald and Pennington. (McDonald has just released a new book on motherhood as well, Unmaking Mary: Shattering the Myth of Perfect Motherhood.)
The first episode releases today on work, the segment to which I contributed, on your preferred podcast platform, and please check out the entire series as the episodes roll out.