It’s been a busy year – what do you mean it’s December? What do you mean New Year is less than two weeks away? What do you mean it’s nine days to 2026??? What do you mean it’s a year since I defrosted the freezer?
It’s been a busy year, and I have procrastinated everything that isn’t writing. I’m not going to ask my family if they feel I procrastinated them this year, because I might not like the answer. I’m not going to ask the freezer, because it can’t talk, although the thick layer of ice jamming one of the drawers says it all without words.
I sift through the layers. In the Palaeozoic era, I uncover frosty bags of oven chips, the remains of ready meals, bought in an attempt to feed my family without sacrificing that most sacred commodity: writing time. The foods are bland and blanched, leached of colour and flavour by the snowfalls and frostbite in their chilly home. The snowfalls, caused each time I stood at the stove-top, thinking about dinner, the freezer door open as I rooted through the contents, the kitchen humidity falling inside like frozen rain.
In this liminal, end of year state, I bring bowls of hot water and line them up on the freezer shelves. The ice thaws, and water drips steadily from the coils that chill the air down to minus eighteen. The thick slabs of opaque ice come away like icebergs calving. I heave the larger chunks into the sink, where they yield up small treasures – frozen peas, tags from bread bags, crumbs – as the water changes state once again. I look at the mess – the small things hidden in frozen wastes, needing to be excavated, and it mirrors my year in many ways. Those small ideas deep in my brain, that need coaxing out with coffee, with effort, with intentionality, with a lot of sitting at my desk. Maybe one can’t happen without the other?
I take a moment, a little sweaty from my efforts to chip away the ice with a plastic scraper, and sit on a kitchen chair, refilling myself with cold water as cold water runs from the freezer into a bowl set to catch it under the drain. The air around me has a chilly humidity that I feel in my wrist bones. It smells like snow. I listen to the music – shards of ice hitting the metal of the cooling coils like timpani. The coursing drip of the water trickling. I let my brain idle in neutral. The thing I was writing before Christmas chores interrupted. The mother and daughter. How to show them not getting along – subtly, not slamming the reader over the head with it. Maybe I can give one of them an action? A large chunk of ice drops and I stand to empty the bowl again, use the antibacterial spray, dry it off and set it running again, an ice-cube tray the canary in the coal mine, alerting me to freezing power.
And on to the next task. The oven, whose stale smell only I notice. The mother and the daughter. I picture them in the kitchen. I picture the mother able to smell the stale smell too. It’s not her oven, but she makes an issue of it, like she makes an issue of everything. I take out the oven cleaner, the yellow rubber gloves. I think about the mother and the daughter and how their fight is baked into them, how it would take something caustic and dangerous to slough off the layers of argument. I use a sponge to spread the stinking goo all over the dark interior. It doesn’t smell of all the dinners made, the dinners shared. It smells like regret. Brown rivers slide down the sides of the oven, pooling. I mop and rinse, mop and rinse, taking care to protect my skin, my eyes. I picture the mother and daughter. The mother nags, the daughter scrubs, scrubs, scrubs. Maybe the daughter can use words to scrub her mother’s judgement away? Maybe something acid will uncover the daughter’s inner core of hard metal? Maybe it will wipe away the years, leaving her new and unbroken.
I finish the cleaning, set the oven to hot, to burn off any final traces of cleaning products. For a few minutes the kitchen is full of fumes, but underneath, I smell something clean, something fresh. For the next few times I use the oven, use the freezer, I will take a moment, think of the work that made them clean, made them new again. But for now, I steal the remaining time in day, hoard it for myself. I sneak off to where I'm writing about the mother and the daughter, and I set the daughter working, cleaning. The activity occupies her, lets her turn her back on her mother. As she scrubs and scrapes, her words flow, my words flow, and I write them through their tangled relationship and into some kind of resolution – a resolution I had not found just sitting at my desk.
Sometimes, cleaning is just the thing I need to loosen my brain. The process of uncovering, layer by layer what I want to say, what I need to see. It’s a balancing act. Too much of either can distract, derail. But sometimes, and especially at this busy time of year, putting on my rubber gloves and getting to the bottom of things – freezers, ovens, kitchen cupboards, relationships – Also Counts as Writing.
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