The world has thrown a million things at these windows: smoke, cooking grease, exhaust, mold running down from the shingles in a hard rain. This is no commercial, where a spray bottle of blue elixir makes everything shiny and new. Petrified scotch tape on the storm door once affixed a litany: Black Lives Matter; Food Not Bombs; Immigrants Are Welcome Here. Now it destroys fingernails and yields only to a putty knife. Degreaser. Ammonia. Vinegar. Serious scrubbing before buffing. But gently. Because this house is a dandelion gone to seed. Fragile and full of possibility. 

Two guests, one asleep, one introducing herself over and over, with a different name each time. She asks: You ever been a foster mom? You ever been to a hot town? Why’re you washing the windows? The washing is for you, Stacy Margaret Carol Amanda Denise. And so for the Son who longs for you. 

Rejoicing in the undreamt-of honor that is tending this house, I wash every millimeter of these windows. Even when I must teeter on the ladder’s top step. Alabaster jars are bought to be broken. To spill their precious oil, anoint His feet, refresh the world.

This article appears in November 2024.

Colleen Shaddox is a print and radio journalist and activist. She has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and America.