Alone at home for a long weekend with nothing but dreadful chores to complete, I received a text message from a nephew.

Hey Aunt Theresa. I’m in your area today, and I thought I’d see if you were around.

A nice surprise! I texted him back and said I was in the basement painting stairs. I typed BORING as part of my text and asked where he was and what his plans were. He said he’d been visiting colleges, visiting a friend, and now that the day was coming to a close, he was looking for his car—which had disappeared under a fresh coating of snow. As soon as he found his car, he planned to come over.

I had tried to make the job of painting the basement stairs more fun for myself by using leftover paint in the bright colors of sunflower yellow and pumpkin orange, but it wasn’t fun at all. Basements are dreary and I am not a subterranean dweller. We have never “finished off” our basement. I can only think of a few underground excursions I like: Wine caves. And—Kartchner Caverns—south of Tucson. (An astonishing underground world.) So I was happy to have the distraction of a traveler in search of pleasant company.

The painting of the basement stairs came about because I didn’t want to look at the plywood anymore. Of course, I thought it would be easy to slap a few coats of paint over the stairs and call it a day, but there were nail holes to fill and other preparations to make in the confines of a stairwell that closed in on me as I worked, becoming a hotbox of paint and spackle fumes in vaporous blends of dank, basement-y, hits with no mind-altering benefits.

When my nephew arrived, he breezed in and told me, with all his heart, how much he loved my house. He said it was a cool place. I have a do-it-yourself kind of house and most of the projects were fun. That’s what shines through.

We went out for sushi. Then we watched free-style skiing competitions. Then I asked him to show me Minecraft.

Then I set him up in a guest room—(the room that used to be my son’s room, but is now painted with sunflower yellow and pumpkin orange, a tribute to his birth close to Halloween)—and my nephew looked out the window and said, with all his heart, how much he loved my gardens. Even buried under the snow he loved them! It grew my heart to know that memories of my gardens were a cherished part of his developing soul.

The next morning, I made a grand New England breakfast for the two of us—waffles with real maple syrup, eggs, homemade hash browns, coffee, orange juice, toast with jam my daughter and I made during the summer.

We sat in the dining room, bright with morning light reflected on snow in the gardens outside the window. We talked about the finishing up of high school and the moving on to college.

My nephew was home schooled until he went to private high school for his last couple of years. He wanted ideas for what to do at his graduation because he had the option of participating in the ceremony with a performance of some kind.

He considered that he might like to write a poem for the occasion. I told him to consult his mother, (my sister), for guidance on the recitation. She is not only an accomplished writer and reader, but she is talented at the lost art and pleasures of reciting and performing all forms of literature.

I often refer to the dining room where my nephew and I were sitting together, as the family chapel. It’s a room adorned with my collection of churchy tchotchkes and cherubs painted on the walls with peace doves, and madonnas with babies, and rosaries, and blessed oils, crucifixes, hearts, candles, wine. It was in this very chapel that I found myself, on that Sunday morning with my nephew, listening to him recall that as a boy, he had memorized poetry. I watched his eyes drift away into the soul of his childhood and then, he began to recite from memory Emily Dickinson:

Because I could not stop for Death–He kindly stopped for me–The Carriage held but just Ourselves–And Immortality.

What a prayer his recitation was—a prayer to the joy of remembrance and performance art and the power of the written word. To listen to my nephew in the setting of my chapel was a blessing all my own, and one that enchanted me. I told him how terrified I used to become trying to memorize literature and trying to prepare myself to recite it when I was a school girl. Listening to him, I was sorry I had never found pleasure in recitation and memorization.

It has become a lost art–the memorization, recitation, and the listening to the sound of literature. Some cultures so revered the spoken word and the powers of storytelling, that they never invented a written language. Indeed, the Egyptian gods feared the creation and use of writing might soften the soulful exercise of keeping the mind and the heart so closely linked—these personal and protected caves where we store our most original memories and unrealized dreams. And yet here we are—at a time in history, standing on a precipice where we are tossing over the cliff the acts of physically writing, and the practices of reading, to the rhythms of turned pages, scribbled marginalia, and tasted pages.

It was, at last, time for my nephew to drive home. I bid him a fond farewell, then glared at the stairs that needed a few more coats of paint. I wasn’t motivated to move back and forth with the brush while squatting and twisting my crickety legs and arms and shoulders inside that corridor of unimportant passages.

So of course you know what I did! The morning’s church service in my chapel, with my special and unexpected guest, had set my soul on fire. There, in a bookshelf in my chapel, (filled with collections of verse and poetry, both adult and childhood styles), I found a book another sister had given me seventeen years ago. The book is called Committed to Memory and it is edited by John Hollander as part of an advisory committee comprised of several rock-star poets weighing in on the “100 best poems to memorize.” I had asked for the book at a time when my mind raced with obsessions over personal grief and I wanted to try putting something else inside my head.

After finding the book, I couldn’t wait to get back to the task of painting. I still had several hours of work before me, but now, when the job was completed, I would have a poem recited from memory, too. And cheerful stairs.

No one was home. I began memorizing by reading, then speaking out loud. Up and down the stairs I went. Painting to the left. Painting to the right. Stopping to think. Being careful not to smear sunflower yellow-orange paint on the book. Every stair became a little stage, every cobweb a theater curtain, and every basement ghost, my silent audience. 

I chose to memorize Snow-Flakes, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow because I like snow and the poem seemed short and simple with a supportive rhyming scheme. But as I painted and practiced and tried to remember the order of the words, the poem started to fill me up with its sad meanings. The pace of my work responded.

And what was my chore now? Was I painting? Was I memorizing a poem? Was I performing? Or was I gone, taking an excursion into the soul of another human being?

Upon completion of my work, upon standing on the bright, sunflowery-orange-yellow of every stair’s surface, I thought that the next thing I would like to do is paint snowflakes here and there on the stairs, too. When I have more time.

The easily distracted apprentice inside of me never knows, whether I am working, or making art. Every distraction is an opportunity.

That’s what shines through.