Grandmother Scrubs the Back Steps

My grandmother washed the back steps on her knees with a scrub brush, hard soap, and a plastic dishpan of dirty water. She would start at the bottom of those curving back steps and work her way up to the kitchen. As I played in the downstairs kitchen, I could hear the scrub of the brush on the old linoleum that looked the same to me before and after she had cleaned.

She wore a light cotton house dress when she cleaned, no girdle underneath, and house slippers with inch high heels. If she wore knee high nylon stockings, which was her habit, I would not see the blue veins in her calves and around her knees. Her knees ached, I could tell, because it took effort and groans to push up from bent knees that rested two steps below the step that was getting scrubbed.

I could dance around her up to the kitchen even when she was scrubbing the steps but everyone else had to, “Stay off the steps while I’m cleaning!” Her dedication to clean steps, steps that surely would be dirtied an hour after they were cleaned, amazed me. Such attention to those lowly back steps surely indicated how much we were loved.

After, grandmother would rest just like God did on the seventh day, with a coffee and a cigarette at the kitchen table. In her resting, I learned myself how to rest, to take a break from work, to pause before moving onto the next blessed task.