Washed
By K. Cowan

It had been yet another day that didn’t turn out the way she wanted it to. She had just spent two weeks on a huge research project and, after two days of checking over her paper, her boss had come into her office, or correction, cubicle that morning and quite bluntly stated that the paper wasn’t “detailed enough to qualify as a thorough investigation into the psychology of a nomadic individual.” Not detailed enough? She had spent hours in the library every evening after work studying countless sources, and spent hours personally interviewing individuals who were either homeless, and thus nomadic, or people whose life situations called for frequent moves, such as military families. Her reference list was over six pages long! She had gone basically sleepless for two weeks, and the paper was not detailed enough Now that she really thought about it……no, she didn’t feel like second-guessing herself right now. She was driving west, and there were clouds on the horizon. Such a deep gray, that if they were to darken one iota, they would definitely be black. They matched her mood perfectly.
Truthfully, her job had never yet been what she thought it was going to be. When she graduated with a Masters in history and psychology, she was on top of the world. She had big dreams of being hired as a research partner and further studying historical events and trying to bring understanding to the world about the human thought processes behind those events. When she had been hired shortly after graduation to work with a widely known and respected professor at a university in another state, she had been ecstatic. It was absolutely a dream come true.
Her job title was “Research Assistant”, but she could more accurately be called “Copy Assistant”. Usually, she spent at least half of her day making copies of resource materials for her boss. The rest of her time was spent typing letters and answering phones. One afternoon, before she left work, she timidly confronted her boss about why she wasn’t getting any independent research assignments. At first he acted offended that she would even have the audacity to ask such a question. When she told him that’s what she understood her job description to entail, he got an arrogant, condescending look on his face and told her she was right. Then, he apologized, quite insincerely, and gave her the “Psychology of the Nomad in Current American Culture” project. He quickly dictated the requirements for the paper, which were basic and extremely vague, and then told her she had creative license to choose in which direction she wanted the research to go. With that, he gave her two weeks and told her she would still be assisting him with “office duties” on top of everything else. She quickly learned that the translation of that meant she must use all of her own spare time to work on this large project, and spend work hours following his orders. It was clear that he thought she was too green to pull it off, and he was going to do everything in his power to make it difficult for her to do so. She was determined to work as hard as she could to prove to him that she was capable of quality work. So she had worked her tail off and finished the paper two days before the deadline. She had even e-mailed copies of the paper to three of her graduate professors for proofreading and critiques and had received accolades from all of them for her hard work and insightful results. She was so excited the day she turned in the report. Now her boss would treat her with respect, because she had worked hard to earn it. Today she found out that she was wrong. On the first assignment entrusted completely to her, she had failed to cut the mustard. She had a sinking feeling that she would not be given another chance to prove herself in the near future, if at all.
To top everything off, she was very far away from home and had no family or friends around to help relieve the tension. It was impossible to call home and complain to people who never wanted her to go in the first place. Not one person in her circle of close friends and family had supported her decision to move so far away, not even her boyfriend of almost four years. They were in love, and on the verge of serious commitment, but when her dream job offer materialized, she realized they were not as solid as she thought. He wanted to stay, and she wanted to go. Both wanted the other person to make sacrifices and neither one was willing to, so she had accepted the job and moved to a brand new place alone. No, she couldn’t call home to complain. She was in no mood to hear “I told you so”, not even a hint of it in the voice of her mother when she thought she was cleverly masking it by saying, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry!” Yeah, right. She glanced at the clock on her car radio. It would be time for dinner when she got home, and she was not in the mood to cook. She pulled into the parking lot at the grocery store, hoping they had some of that delicious lasagna in the deli. It reminded her of having dinner with her grandparents. They would have been very proud of her. She turned off the car and quickly grabbed her purse. Those storm clouds were getting closer.
Of course they didn’t have lasagna on Tuesday evening. Friday was lasagna day, but they had some lovely Chicken a la King if she cared to have some of that. No, she didn’t care for any. She wanted lasagna. She left the deli empty handed and went to the freezer section. The pictures on the boxes of the frozen lasagnas made her stomach turn, and the prices weren’t much better. Her date with lasagna was not meant to be. She settled for a fresh loaf of bread, some peanut butter and a gallon of water and checked out.
Outside, the wind nearly knocked her purse and her groceries out of her arms. She shakily fumbled for her keys and, once she found them, she flopped herself into her car, a windblown mess. She wondered if this day could be any more frustrating. She started the car and headed toward her small house in the suburbs, hoping to get there before it started raining. In a strange defiance of the pattern of her day, she actually made it home before the rain. Brown leaves were swirling around in her small yard, and the potted plant on her front stoop had blown over. She grabbed her grocery bags and ran to the kitchen door. Once inside, she flipped on the small CD player on the counter and began emptying her grocery sacks. She remembered that her cell phone was dead and she needed to charge it. When she turned around to grab it out of her purse from the counter, it wasn’t there. Crap! She had left her purse in the blasted car! She peeked through the curtains on the side door to peek at the sky. The darkness was right overhead. She reasoned with herself. If she just opened the door and bee-lined it for the car, she could grab her purse and sprint back into the house before she got soaked, right? Instead of answering her own mental question, she impulsively opened the door and dashed outside. Before she was halfway to the car, she felt the first raindrop hit her arm. Then, another one on her hand, then three on her neck. By the time she reached for the door handle, she could no longer count how many were hitting her. She clutched the door handle but, instead of pulling the door open, she stood there. “What am I doing?” she wondered. “I’m getting soaked. Why don’t I just grab my purse and get back in the house, before I ruin this suit?” Her rational thoughts kept coming, but her body was being irrational. It was as if she were wearing concrete boots, weighting her down to the ground. Then her mind began to agree with her body. “This rain feels kind of good” she told herself. “When was the last time you played in the rain?” She couldn’t even remember the answer to her own crazy question. She just stood there, getting soaked, the wind blowing against her. She looked down at her arms and noticed that they were covered with goosebumps, which was strange, because she didn’t feel cold at all. In fact, she felt warm all over. She lifted her face to the sky and let the raindrops pelt her skin. Suddenly, she could move. She kicked her shoes off and threw her coat onto the muddy drive and finished it off by stomping it into a mud puddle. She opened her car door and grabbed her purse out of the passenger seat, digging through it to find her cell phone. She flung it against the side of the house. She watched as it cracked apart, and fell onto the ground. She chuckled. The chuckle felt so good that it grew into a giggle. The giggle quickly swelled into breathless laughter, and she began to dance and splash her feet in the mud puddle, just like she did at her grandparents’ farm when she was a kid. She began to spin around with her arms out and her face skyward, just spinning and spinning, feeling the fresh raindrops send a black trail of mascara down her cheeks and onto her neck. It felt so good to feel the drops hit her face, tap on her closed eyes and soak her hair and clothes. She stopped spinning and she was dizzy. She always loved that feeling as a girl, not being able to tell where you had landed until the world stopped whizzing around and you regained your balance.
She was surprised that she was still upright, once her house and the blowing trees in her yard stopped twirling around in front of her. She left her phone and her ruined jacket and shoes on the ground outside and she ran into the house, leaving the door open behind her. She wanted to hear the sound of the storm. She walked over to her china hutch and pulled out her favorite plate. It was so beautiful, all white and glossy with a small, soft pink flower pattern around the rim. It was so clean that she could see her reflection in it, and so delicate that she held it with great care. She saw the black streaks running down her face and she smiled, a smile so strange she didn’t even recognize herself. With sudden force she hurled the plate across the room and it shattered against the wall with a startling noise and fell, scattering a million pieces on the old hardwood floor. One by one, without stopping, she grabbed each gorgeous piece of china out of her hutch and hurled it with great gusto into the wall, watching it smash with satisfaction. When she and her boyfriend had become engaged, she had went straight to the store and promptly registered for the pattern she had had her eye on since she was eighteen years old. By the time their wedding was a month away, she had received every piece she had listed on her gift registry, and had lovingly opened them and placed them in the hutch that her grandma had left to her. Those dishes were so beautiful. She was surprised at how easily they broke. One moment they were beautiful plates, the next moment shattered so thoroughly that you never would have known what they were in the first place.
After the last piece of wedding china had been destroyed, she sat down at her dining room table, breathless. She laid her soaked head on her shaky arms and sobbed quietly. She sat there, letting tears drip onto her arms and fall into a puddle on the table. She stayed there for a long time, allowing the tears to come, mostly because she was unable to stop them anymore. When she finally lifted her head, it was completely dark outside and even darker in the house. She could hear the rain steadily falling on her stoop through the kitchen door, which was still standing wide open. She took a deep breath. The rain made the house smell fresh. She turned on the lights in the kitchen and dining room, and surveyed the mess on her floor. She found her broom in the closet and swept the broken glass into a huge pile and began to scoop it into the trash can. As she was cleaning up the last bits, she noticed that the hardwood floor was scratched from the falling shards and that there were paths worn into the wood where people had constantly walked over the same spots for years. It was beat up and worn, but she thought about how beautiful it must have been when it was brand new. She wanted to make it look like new again.
Once the floor was free of porcelain fragments, she looked at the open door and debated about heading out into the darkness to retrieve her jacket, shoes and now useless cell phone. A low rumble of thunder prompted her to close the door and lock it instead. She headed to the kitchen cupboards and opened them up. Inside was another gift left to her by her grandmother. The old set of every day dishes that her grandparents had dined on together for almost sixty years were now her every day dishes. There was nothing fancy or particularly special about them. The pattern on them was called Village and it depicted farm scenes in muted green and brown tones. Some were chipped or cracked and others had stains from overheating, but she treasured them because she had been served so many lovingly prepared meals on them at her grandma’s table. She took every single piece out and moved them into the now empty spots in the hutch. Though old and faded, they looked beautiful now that they were in their rightful place. She smiled with satisfaction and turned off the lights.
She stood under the showerhead and marveled at how good she felt inside, despite the rotten day she had. Her dance in the rain and china party had been refreshing and she felt, for some reason, like a ton of bricks had been lifted off her chest. Her bed felt especially soft and cozy and the lamplight cast a warm glow over her bedroom. She found herself thinking about her grandma again and she reached over and picked up the Bible off of her nightstand. A pang of shame coursed through her as she reached for a tissue to dust it off. She hadn’t looked at that book, or even thought about it, at all lately. That is something her grandma would not be happy about. She opened it and the pages smelled familiar. Her grandma used to read passages to her right before bed, when she spent the night there. Then, Grandma would pray for her and kiss her softly on the cheek. She always drifted off peacefully when she stayed at Grandma and Grandpa’s. All she could specifically remember about the Bible was that her grandma liked to often read to her out of the book of Hebrews. She didn’t remember what it was about, but she turned there since it was the only reference point she had. She began reading verse after verse. Slowly, they rang familiar to her. She could almost hear her grandma’s gentle voice and smell her lavender perfume. The passages were comforting and before she knew it, she was in chapter ten. He eyes locked on verse twenty-two.: “let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.” She wasn’t sure about the “full assurance” of her faith and she especially knew that she had not been close to God in a long while, but something in those words pulled at her heartstrings. It was exactly how she felt---as if her heart had been sprinkled to cleanse her of a guilty conscience. Standing out there in her driveway, while the storm raged around her and the rain soaked her skin, she felt like she was being washed. She had felt a sense of freedom from all the things that had gone wrong in her life, whether she had caused them or not. It didn’t matter now, because she knew things didn’t have to stay the way they were. She closed the Bible and turned off her lamp. As she snuggled down into bed she noticed how quiet it was. The rain had finally stopped completely. The only remnant of the evening’s storm was a final flash of lightening, a quiet burst of brightness that filled her room before she closed her eyes in peaceful sleep.
When her alarm beeped the next morning, she didn’t press snooze as she had been in the habit of doing lately. She was dressed and pouring herself a cup of tea in record time. As she walked to her car, she was not one bit surprised that the sky was completely cloudless. On her drive to the office, she noticed how beautiful everything looked. She had not realized until now just how dry and dusty everything had gotten, but last night’s storm had done wonders. Though it was late fall, and all the leaves were almost now fallen, it seemed as if the very branches of the trees had been invigorated, standing at attention and relieved to be rid of the weight of the dead leaves. This was the first time since her first day on the job that she was actually excited to get to work--not because she thought her boss would have a sudden revelation that her research project had in fact been brilliant and that he was a pompous, self-absorbed jerk, though this would have definitely been enjoyable for her. No, she was glad to get there because she knew what she had to do. It made her cringe to admit it, but she knew that her boss was right. Her research paper had not been detailed enough because she had failed to put herself into it. Yes, she had explored the psychology of nomadic behavior in others, but wasn’t she a nomad herself, in a sense? She had left everything she ever knew and went to a new place to start something new for herself. Was it because she wanted this job so badly or because she was trying to run away from people, things, or situations that she was too scared to face? She needed a second chance to take these questions into consideration. Not because she wanted to prove her boss wrong, but because she wanted to know the answers to these questions.
When she calmly and boldly made her request to him in his office, he remained quiet for some time. He tried not to show it, but she sensed respect in his eyes. Finally, he granted her request and gave her another two weeks to polish her report. Before she stepped out of his office, she thanked him and assured him that she wouldn’t let him down. He was looking over some papers on his desk. He didn’t look up and his expression didn’t change. He simply replied, “I know.” Victory!
How different today was from yesterday. These were her thoughts as she ate lasagna off of her promoted china. After an hour of moving furniture out of her dining room and scrubbing the floors so they could be sanded, she took a warm shower and fell into bed. She picked up the Bible again, but before she opened it, she closed her eyes and imagined her grandma’s sweet face. Her grandma had spent so much time with her, not lecturing or scolding, but gently encouraging. And grandma had taught her about God and faith. She had lost her way, but she knew Grandma was watching over her, helping guide her back to where she needed to be. She was so thankful that she had known such a simple, caring woman. Everything about her had been beautiful, from her face and hair to her kind words and loving spirit. Even Grandma’s name was beautiful--Hope. She was honored to be her namesake. Now it was time to start living up to it. She opened the Bible.

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 13.10.2009

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