Blog o’ Gnosis

My paternal grandmother was a Naval officer’s wife, and through the years she spent travelling with her husband and sons from base to base, she always employed a housekeeper. The last of these, when she and my grandfather were in their late 70s and living in a modest apartment in Oakland, was a woman named Chrysentia.

Nana was a cipher to me growing up. The second to last child in a large Catholic family from New Jersey, her ancestors had emigrated before the Revolutionary War and were part of New England’s “blue blood” families. Haughtiness was something that came naturally to Nana, along with an effortless look of disdain, extreme neatness and a preference for well-mannered grandchildren.

My mother, with her own Protestant pretensions and East Coast pedigree (and a vehemently Masonic, anti-Catholic father, but that’s another story), often bristled at her mother-in-law’s manner. At one point my parents had borrowed a piece of furniture which for some reason Nana asked to have returned. When my mother brought it back to their apartment Nana took one look at the piece, sniffed ever so slightly, and said, “this looks like a job for Chrysentia.”

I never met Chrysentia, but undoubtedly the most difficult part of her job was coping with Nana. Other than that, being their housekeeper must have been pretty easy: two old people with plastic covers on the sofa, and no one tracking in mud. Of course, my mother’s rejoinder to Nana’s insult was to insult Chrysentia, saying all she ever did was smear Lemon Pledge on everything. Touché. Poor Chrysentia has therefore blended in my mind with the character Lupita from the great Showtime series Weeds—riding the gravy train until someone croaks or gets arrested.

Probably due to my mother’s constant re-telling of that story, the phrase “this looks like a job for Chrysentia” has become something of a standing joke among my sisters and I. So it was no surprise that this week, barely coping with the work of painting my living room with deadlines looming, I found myself muttering “where the [bleep] is Chrysentia?” more than once. Okay, a couple dozen times. But now my living room is a lovely shade of pale peach, free of dog hair, swept and mopped, dusted, no cobwebs, windows washed, artwork re-hung, curtains hemmed, baseboards cleaned, and so on.

Balancing domestic and work-related tasks is rarely easy, and I have been up against it quite a bit this month as I chip away at several maintenance projects on my property while juggling at least as many writing and business projects as well. I don’t have a Chrysentia to do the drudge work—it all falls to me. There is no real solution to this conflict other than more hard work, but putting things on Chrysentia’s to-do list does inject a little humor into the situation.

So that is my tale of striving for balance on this most serendipitous of weekends: a gorgeous full moon, Spring Equinox and Easter all rolled into one. On Sunday I am having some very good friends over for brunch, where we will feast on sweet and savory, and leaven the holiday with the best of tonics: laughter, conversation, love and trust.

Blessed Equinox, everyone.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Family, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.