It is an early Spring cleaning day at Ahu TongEriki… Our annual household holiday (the Ascension of St. Marlin) is coming up this week, and we will be hosting our traditional dinner. That, in itself, is a story for another time.
I focused on deep cleaning the library — pulling out all the tchotchkies and miscellany, dusting them, dusting under them, oiling all the wood. A maximalist household aesthetic comes with a serious commitment to dusting.
When I was a child, one of my jobs was cleaning and polishing all the wood in the household. Maybe I was given that job because it was hard to screw up; or maybe because I was small and so polishing the legs of the chairs was less a hardship for me.
Anyway, I still do that job, in this household. And when I sit in front of the Lion chair, polishing the faces, I feel some strange sense of the continuity of existence.
It sits in the house that used to be my stepmom’s, in the room that used to be her office. Time is thin in that room. Sometimes I am sitting in there, and I feel bewildering vertigo as I can see the room just as she had it. Is it 2003 or 2023? Or is it 1993, and I am sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room of my childhood home, polishing the lion chair?
Notebook 