Cleaning House

We have an art table with two seats that also function as landfills of random art detritus. Today, for the first time in several years, I emptied them and organized. Magazines. Photographs. A hundred coloring book pages. Mandalas. Googly glue on eyes. A print out of a State of Catastrophe Permission Slip from the Chilean Police to Travel During Covid. Paper. Clean. Crumpled. And Cut.

The process took most of the morning. At one point, my daughter came out crying. At five years old, she had grown convinced that art was over. I told her that we were only cleaning house, that it feels good, that we would do a special art project if she helped.

We filled three grocery bags with old art projects. It is best to fill and dump quickly so as to avoid the strange nostalgia of a smudged water color that holds your heart only because you remember when your child made it. Ditching old art is to see the passage of time in a new light.

I couldn’t get rid of any of my son’s recent work. He puts such effort into his drawings now that he is ten, and he comes to the art table far less frequently now than his sister. When he comes, he stays. He’ll labor over a piece until it meets his tight quality control standards

So when the three of us sat down for our special art project, an acrylic window treatment to celebrate the change from summer to fall, he sat on one end of the table, and his sister the other. They welcomed fall to Chile in their own ways, and we reinstalled the window at the back of our apartment where the light pours in on Sunday mornings, as if it intends to fix itself on our tile floor and remain.

The afternoon light pulling away from our project