Penance

I did keep silence yesterday. Until the sun went down I spoke not a word and found the experience grimly gratifying. The whole time I was standing over a ten-foot long dining table scrubbing and scrubbing it with a strong solvent and coarse steel wool until the badly dinged and gummy finish finally dissolved to reveal the living wood beneath.It was a good job for the day, though I stood for five hours bent to the task and filling my lungs with those toxic chemicals while just outside this sunny day to the left here bloomed like an Easter corsage.It kept reminding me of Confession, the way you‘d feel on a Saturday when you gathered all your  courage and ducked quick  into that velvet-curtained ‘phone booth’ . I always told not the slight small sins but the biggest and worst ones. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t getting forgiveness under false pretenses.  Stripping off a marred finish really does feel like you're examining your conscience, which is as unnerving a process as searching the back of that closet with the dead-mouse smell. As I scraped and sanded my way through the day I thought about the people I have harmed in my life.I started the day angry – some website lifted my whole post  yesterday and ran it as theirs - and then I thought of King Lear at the height of his poor-me prase carrying on about he was a man more sinned against than sinning. As if that’s ever true.  Anyway it’s never been true in my case, so I was glad to have spent the day clearing away the accretions of greasy diner’s fingers and lemon oil and the wax of a thousand candles to come at last upon the bare wood, as clean and plain and fragrant as ever it was in the silent forest.Now tomorrow some pigment to fire the grain and then a fresh coat of finish for protection.

shriven