Inhaling Plaster Dust

Every tradesman I ever consulted about the grasscloth wallpaper we pasted up some 30 years ago said, “Lady, that stuff’s hard as the dickens to get off. You’d do better putting up new drywall!”

AND, since so many construction workers have been laid off and are looking for work, and since we are trying to get our house ready for the market (whenever the market is ready for us), and since we also had a leak over our heads in the window above our bed and the ceiling was bowed and the plaster was crumbling, we decided to bite the financial budget and have the work done. Might as well have it all done at the same time.

“What a mess,” warned friends. “You’ll be finding plaster dust for years.”

David and I arrived home from three weeks away in Kenya on April 23. I left almost immediately with 12 women for a three-day Retreat of Silence. I returned to empty my suitcase, then move furniture from the bedroom into the upstairs hallway, my study and David’s study. We unpacked the kitchen armoire filled with blue and white china—no kitchen counter space now to speak of—and pushed it away from the onerous wallpaper wall. Then we rolled up the area rug and hefted all the furniture in the dining room into a corner and removed all the decorative items from the living room. “Might as well get it all done at the same time”—the living-room ceiling had holes due to leaks from the upstairs bathrooms. (Those had been repaired, but the holes stared dolefully at all guests and winked defiantly at me—jagged dark eyes that leered, You will never get us fixed. Henk. Henk. Henk.

Fortunately, we were scheduled to grandparent-sit with my daughter’s two children. Their parents had a two-week journey overseas ending with a conference in Israel. We said good-bye to them, monitored swine-flu reports, and I plunged into some cleaning projects at Melissa’s house, grateful to have a clean place, a bedroom with fresh sheets and a vacuum cleaner I could find.

Once the new drywall was up in all the rooms at home, once the plasterer who taped and “mudded” the walls, moving agilely on aluminum stilts, had finished his process, then all the new plasterboard was sanded—kitchen and dining room and living-room ceiling and bedroom. My cautioning friends were right: We will be cleaning for years. What they failed to report was the fact that I have plaster dust on every conceivable surface—cabinets, walls, bathroom counters, stove, kitchen soffit. Every footstep sends up plumes of soft white powder. I have gone through four wet/dry-vac filters, and the floors need to be scrubbed inch by inch by a determined worker (my husband).

It took David and me one whole day, with three hours of help of my friend’s son, Dan, who was supposed to be working in the yard but came in because of rain, and with the merciful compassion of a dear and wonderful friend who also gave us three hours of help, to clean all the plaster dust out of the living room and to put all the furniture back in place—one whole day! Of course, David is painting the walls as we go, since we want to push the large armoires back into place ONCE. Tomorrow I will begin to apply Bruce Hardwood Floors Wax and Stain on the parts of the dining-room floor that have been scrubbed of white crust and plaster splotches. Then, we will push the dining-room armoire back, and I will paint/wipe the interior to lighten it, then we will wash all the American pottery that makes its home in that cupboard and replace it. Then we will take a day (one whole day) to complete cleaning, scrubbing and polishing the rest of the dining room.

In addition, the friend’s son, Dan, needs money and has time and has been working with me in the gardens to make up for the spring gardening days we missed while we were in Kenya. Needless to say, I go to bed at nights aching beyond description, am too tired to sleep, and swear that I have inhaled so much plaster dust I have drywall particles on the brain. I will never get the dirt out from under my fingernails—they don’t clean up anymore, they just break.

What does this sound like to you? It sounds like chaos to me. It is chaos.

Perhaps you might be interested in some of the thoughts I have been having as we are digging (and digging and digging) out of the chaos.

I take great comfort in the first chapter in Genesis. “The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters.” NLT. Or, as I remember from my King James days, “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.” Genesis 1:2.

My first thought is this—it is one that even God, especially God, understands: We cannot create beauty, harmony, peace or savor the satisfaction of accomplishment if we are not willing to plunge into chaos.

Chaos is not our enemy. It is the fear we meet in the middle of chaos that is our enemy. (Confession: My personal fear is that I will not be able to get through the mess, that I will live out my life with dishes stacked on the counters, leaving the house with streaks of dust on my clothes because I brush against walls not yet wiped due to groping in my clothes bureaus, which are pushed into the hallway, and with poufs of white dust flying with every footstep.)

Genesis says that God looked on the chaos and said, “Let there be light.” I am choosing to believe that God is working with me in the chaos of the house and the chaos of the garden.

David is painting the walls with Ralph Lauren’s Plaza Green Suede Finish. Sometimes the daylight dapples the freshly painted walls and they look pale aqua, sometimes blue, sometimes a soft lime. Oh, I love these colors, I think, and realize I have been hungry to live with this color palate. I’m tired of white walls.

When our friends came to help clean the living room and put everything back in place, David said, “It really helps to have extra hands.” So the second thought I am thinking is this: Chaotic jobs go faster when people work together.

We really need to face the chaos in our lives with other people who are good scrubbers, washers, dusters, diggers, haulers, etc. etc. How little we share the work of our living with others—those complicated passages where help would really help! My friend said to me as I handed dishes off the kitchen soffit to her to wash, “We do everything else well—we do meetings, and church projects, and tasks and planning. But we’re so busy doing all these things we don’t know how to pitch in and get our hands dirty with someone else’s messes. We don’t know how to do life together.”

This may be one of the reasons God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is just right for him.” Genesis 2:18, NLT. Chaos is a task better attached by multiples.

Right now, the garden is in better order than the house. That is only because my friend’s son has taken on the menial tasks that often bog me down. Three days ago, he chopped out a tenacious creeping vine in a wooded corner by a little patio I put down last summer. He dug out the weeds and David cut back some of the wild elderberry bushes. Yesterday I was all alone in the garden and it was a perfectly beautiful May day. I had salvaged cement pavers from the house of a friend who also generously gave me a carload of divisions and plantings. I sprayed an old birdcage an outrageous electric blue, laid down the pavers, dug in a hydrangea cutting and some ground cover. I moved two bird feeders to the end of the lilac bushes, which adjoins this spot, and watched the chickadees come and go, watched an elegant butterfly and a fat bumblebee feed on lilac flower nectar, and spotted an electric green beetle waddling across my new patio. I’ve decided that this little corner will be called the “grotto.”

And I sat in the sun, I knew why God looked at His work, beauty out of formlessness, order out of the void, shimmering light out of the darkness, and He said, “It is good; it is very good!” But I wouldn’t have my little grotto if someone hadn’t done the frustrating labor of cutting and chopping and digging.

In a couple of months we will be out of this chaos. We will be glad that we entered into the formlessness of plaster dust. The dappled green/aqua/blue walls are promises that one day we will say, “Oh, isn’t this wonderful? How good to be rid of that dingy grasscloth! How great that the bedroom ceiling no longer threatens to fall on our heads! Look, the holes in the living-room ceiling are gone! Isn’t the smell of fresh paint clean and hopeful? Can it possibly be that the garden has bloomed from spring to fall?”

We will emerge from our chaos, but listen carefully to me, so will you. Yes, you will. God is a God who does delight in bringing form and light into the void. But you will have to go through the chaos to get to creation.

Another thing: The gingerbread clock my father gave me before he died has not ticked or chimed for fifteen years. Because of the chaos, we moved it to another spot. It is now ticking regularly and chiming on the hour and the half-hour. It is content in its new place, its inner mechanisms perfectly balanced. “I like it here,” it strikes—one, two, three, four, five—. I listen to it when I am awake at night. It chimes from the downstairs. I think it is worth inhaling plaster dust just to have the antique gingerbread clock singing again—it is good, it is very good.

Karen Mains

NOTICE:

If you are looking for a spiritual companion, director, soul mentor — someone who is trained to walk the spiritual way with you and if you are in the Chicago area, please contact us. AND — if you are trained as a spiritual companion, director, soul mentor and have room in your schedule for another mentoree, please contact us. We’ll try to expedite spiritual matchmaking here in the office.

Exciting News!

We are so pleased to announce that Carla Boelkens has agreed to become the Director of the Global Bag Project. Carla, who has been ministering internationally for years, traveled with Karen Mains to Africa in March of 2008 and has been a partner in developing this microcredit outreach in the year since. Starting in July, Carla will ease into this position by keeping her part-time job and working one day a week, then increase her hours as the Global Bag Project grows. A small office adjoining our Mainstay Ministries suite has been made available to us by our building manager for a most reasonable fee of $150 a month. We will need, however, to furnish it. A computer desk, a relatively new computer, furniture to set up a shipping and mailing center, and storage units are essential. If you are downsizing, or know of some offices that no longer need these items, please let us know.

Even starting up a small office (and starting cautiously) means there will be expenses, so any donations to support the Global Bag Project office would be greatly appreciated. Checks can be made out to Hungry Souls, marked for the Global Bag Project and mailed to Hungry Souls, Box 30, Wheaton, IL, 60187.

Reminder!

The Soulish Food e-mails are being posted biweekly on the Hungry Souls Web site. Newcomers can look that over and decide if they want to register on the Web site to receive the biweekly newsletter. You might want to recommend this to friends also. They can go to www.HungrySouls.org.

Karen Mains

BOOK CORNER

Black & Decker Wiring 101: 25 Projects You Really Can Do Yourself

By Jodie Carter

Excerpt from page 5:

HERE'S HOW TO USE THIS BOOK.

The first two pages of each project give you the background information and any technical understanding that will be helpful to understanding what you're about to do. You'll learn about the skills required, get an idea of how long the proejct might take, and see all the tools and materials you'll need to gather to do a project.

Then, turn the page and begin. Virtually every step is photographed so you'll see exactly how to do the work, and along the way you'll find helpful sidebars that show you what to do if something unexpected happens, tips for using tools correctly, safety recommendations, and more. Before you know it, you'll notch up another home-repair success.

It's that easy. Really.

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