Volume 3, No. 19: In Praise of the Untranslatable

On complicated invitations

Greetings, book people! Last Sunday, I got all set up on my breezy porch with my pot of tea and my stack of books, excited to spend the day reading. But about 20 pages into Zami, I was so distracted I was reading sentences four or five times in a row. I was daydreaming about cleaning. So I put Zami aside, popped in my audiobook (Losing Music by John Cotter), and cleaned and reorganized my tea cabinet. Then I took all the dishes out of the hutch and cleaned it. I swept the whole house. I emptied my massive cookbook shelf, sorted and catalogued my cookbooks, dusted and cleaned the shelf, and put it back together.

My newly sorted cookbook shelf.

I cleaned for six hours and afterward I was sore and happy. I am not a miraculously new person this week. There’s a lot in my life that’s still hard and messy. But I feel lighter. I didn’t do any cleaning in my office, but even so, when I sat down to work this morning, the space felt new. I’m grateful for the refresh. I often feel a lot of dread th…