Graveyard Dirt: Two Worlds and In-between

Glass Bottle Cemetery

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I have a crazy huge thing about glass bottles; I can't get rid of them. From blocky garlic salt bottles to impossibly narrow hot sauce bottles they all, eventually, get run through the dishwasher and committed to a semi-final resting place. And they late in state for a week, a month, sometimes a half-year collecting dust until I finally need one for something.

There are two places empty glass bottles go to die - the detached outside room (which is currently being used as storage, but we're planning to clean it out and renovate it so we have a much larger - and much more private! - bedroom), and the top of the bedroom dresser (which kind've sort've serves as an altar space when not cluttered up with bottles and bones and feathers and plants and half-started projects and gifts for others).

With fall barreling down upon us I'm starting to get a nesting itch, but I've been trying to hold off on scratching it until the end of the harvest (the blackberries are just about to ripen and then, not long after, the elderberries and rowan berries should be ready). As the house tempts me with forgotten, dusty corners I'm beginning to find partially finished projects and gifts strewn across various altar spaces that quicken that sense of cleaning'n'organizing urgency. ("OH, GOD, I PROMISED I'D GET THIS THING OUT //LAST FUCKING YEAR//! I'LL PUT THIS GIFT RIGHT HERE AND TRY TO GET TO IT NEXT WEEK FOR REALZ.")

I haven't planned it, but in the next few weeks we'll be dismantling the bedroom piece by piece for winter cleaning (in Spring we welcome the Bride, in Winter we welcome the Hag). The room will be completely emptied except for the dresser (too heavy to move so it gets pushed into the center of the room to open up the space it normally occupies) and the bed frame which'll get turned on its side to make vacuuming the entire room a billion times easier.

Following the skirting boards I'll outline the perimeter of the room with salt, and then create my MAGIC CLEANING MIX (natural cleaning solution (Ecover, usually) + sea salt + rosemary, lemon balm and lemon essential oils + hot, crazy hot, water). Then, using an ordinary scouring pad for dishes, I wash everything*, leaving no corner or side or panel untouched.

(* The skirting boards, the walls, the ceiling, the ceiling fan, the outside of the dresser, the inside of the dresser, the two nightstands, the three drawers that reside in each nightstand, the bed frame, the thresholds of the room (window and door), the radiator and every fucking thing that resides in the room - whether it's a statue sitting on top of one of the nightstands or a tarot deck usually kept within a drawer. Nothing - not even a book thrown into a corner - is allowed back into the room without being thoroughly cleaned.)

While I'm cleaning - because it's usually a one day, if not two, event - the bedsheets get washed with a sprinkle of salt and sometimes a drop of ritual oil in the detergent. Slowly, but surely, the room beings to reknit. After washing and drying everything with my MAGIC CLEANING MIX I vacuum the room picking up debris and salt, right the frame and return the dresser to its corner.

The nightstands, empty, get moved back into place revealing the skeletal foundation of our bedroom. The mattress returns, febreezed and flipped, the various altars get reassembled and drawers are carefully filled once again. By the time the last laundered sheet is fitted the room's perfumed with the scent of cleansing, living green (the essential oils) followed shortly by purifying smoke (a mix of pure frankincense - in resin form - burned with dried rosemary and sage).

And after an exhausting day of hard, manual labor I pass out - sore, but satisfied - on bedsheets that feel like new, in an ossuary that smells like an herbal garden knowing that for the rest of the season we're secure and protected* in the magical fortress built by sweat and intention by an anally retentive matriarch who feels that cleaning isn't just a social necessity, but a fine fucking art.

(* HONEY, WHEN YOU'VE SPENT 12-24 HOURS CLEANING THE FUCKING SCREWS THAT KEEP YOUR NIGHTSTAND DRAWERS TOGETHER THERE'S NO NEED TO CAST A CIRCLE FOR "PROTECTION"; I BLEACH THE TOILET WITH MY BARE HANDS, I SCRUB THE PADDING ON THE FEET OF THE BED - NOTHING, AND I MEAN //NOTHING//, CROSSES THE LINE OF A WOMAN WHO SCRUBS URINE STAINS FROM THE BASE OF THE TOILET WILLINGLY.)

How do I know winter cleaning's going to happen in the next few weeks without even planning or scheduling it? Because I've already begun shifting empty glass bottles from their makeshift cemetery, gradually but methodically freeing up the space on top of the closet. (<- That's the instability that creates the avalanche. When my neurotic attention is drawn to one mess, it's not long before I compulsively attack the others and everything, like the Tower, comes tumbling town.)