The busting out day is here

I can feel a short wick inside myself. Sitting on the loveseat in the dark is not helping. It only really works when I don’t reach for coffee and when my knees don’t protest and when the mouse doesn’t scuttle off the arm of the couch and lie with it’s red-lighted underbelly blinking under the window – so far away that I have to get up for it. I close my eyes. Breathe. I need a shower.

I wait a lot. I wait until a proper time to take my shower so that if it wakes Henry it’s not too early, and so that it’s not too late to interfere with the schedules of those who have to get somewhere. I postpone vacuuming until no one is home if I can, same with washing the floor. Housework is not an easy thing to do with people about. When no one is home I least want to do it but I enjoy it most. I putter. Work at my own pace. Feel as if I’m tending my home rather than picking up after everyone else.

I just read that a ‘green’ initiative has a lot of janitors coming off the night shift and doing their work during the day. I wonder how that’s going to turn out. Will they vacuum at lunch hour? An hour before people get there? Pull the wastebaskets out from beneath peoples’ desks while they’re sitting at them? Will they be happier? Relieved to be working days, or will they miss the quiet nights and the ease of an un-peopled space? Will they learn to wait or will they become little dictators, mother-like in their instructions: Don’t leave your half-eaten apple on your desk unless you want it tossed, set your garbage can out or empty it yourself, don’t take your bathroom break at 10:30 – it’ll be closed for cleaning.

I wonder if janitors will feel more like janitors when they work days and have to plan their work around the schedules and habits of others. Will they feel more a part of the team and move valued, or like an irritating “other” whose work is an undervalued inconvenience? Will they chafe at feeling more invisible than they did when they moved about in the dark, or will they try to be invisible?

And will there be follow-up articles some day that track the progress of the change? Will it only be in the transition that it is hard – like so many other matters confronted as our many and varied jobs shift away from the roles that once contained them and leave the feelings and new actions that come of the container busting?

Waiting isn’t the worst thing in the whole scenario of doing our own janitorial tasks or awaiting our own transitions. The sky lightens while you wait.

As Henry says, “The day is here.”