Mantenimiento

It's hard to focus on writing when I'm at home - ironic since I'm supposed to be writing about home - but my thoughts are scattered by a to-do list that will probably never end: unpack, do laundry, clean the chick's bedding, clean the kitchen, make bread, fix my banjo neck, practice the banjo, plant snow peas, water the seedlings in the greenhouse, pick more nettles, fix my sewing machine, mend a scratched-up armchair . . .

But then again, this is what home feels like these days: an endless procession of tasks. When I'm feeling defeated by what feels like a daily grind, I often think of a book I read a couple of years ago called Zapotec Science. It's a book about subsistence agriculture in indigenous communities, where people use the term mantenimiento (maintenance) to describe the daily tasks and rituals involved in sustaining their way of life on the land. I don't know why that word resonates so much with me, but I think of it often.

For me it has come to mean that there is value in the daily rhythms and routines, in just keeping on keeping on. In a society obsessed with forward motion, mantenimiento is a reminder that the most profoundly powerful forces are not linear but cyclical. Spring blooms into summer, explodes in fall, decomposes in winter, only to be born again. Rain turns to oceans that fly into the sky and become clouds, only to fall again. I cook to clean to cook to clean to cook.