Soap and water

Published in Age of Empathy

Photo Christian Agbede on Unsplash

I carried the warm water carefully, trying not to spill it onto the carpet because my father hated messes.

The water sloshed inside a mustard-colored plastic basin Jan had brought home from the hospital after her surgery, the kind made for sickness. She balanced her Lady Gillette razor beneath her chin and laughed.

“Don’t worry about a little water, honey,” she said. “I don’t care about a single thing except getting my legs shaved.”

We exchanged a quick smile because we were thinking the same thing: Dad wouldn’t be home until supper.

I was sixteen years old and terrified I might cut her.

Beach towels covered the bed. I lifted her leg onto my knee, dipped the razor into soapy water, and pulled upward from ankle to knee. My hands trembled as I tried to find the right angle. I awkwardly scooted closer beside her.

“Well, aren’t we cozy?” Jan teased.

“Don’t make me laugh,” I said as water slid over the edge of the basin.

She had a low, throaty voice — probably from smoking, though everybody smoked in the 1960s. There was something easy about her, something unguarded. She never acted overly motherly or perfect. I liked her from the beginning.

When I finished, I realized I’d been holding my breath. I dried her legs gently and rubbed Jergens lotion into her skin. That’s when I saw tears caught in her eyelashes.

I was crying too.

Not because shaving her legs mattered so much in itself, but because somewhere in that ordinary afternoon, I recognized love.

Not romantic love. Not even gratitude exactly.

Something quieter.

The tenderness of caring for another person with your own hands.

At sixteen, I had never done anything so intimate for someone else.

I didn’t have language for what happened that afternoon until twenty years later, during a Maundy Thursday service at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church.

Before the service, I’d been skeptical. I’d even washed my feet carefully beforehand and worn clean socks. I worried about kneeling before strangers and touching their feet. And what if I ended up with some man who’d worn work boots all day?

Then Father Al explained the meaning of maundy: a command.

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

After the homily, the congregation began washing one another’s feet.

I knelt before an elderly woman whose arthritic toes bent sideways with bunions like my grandmother’s.

“Is this all right?” I asked while drying between her toes. “Am I hurting you?”

“Oh no, dearie,” she said softly. “You couldn’t hurt these old feet.”

Later, when she washed mine, I unexpectedly began to weep.

I felt loved in a way that was almost impossible to describe — by her, by the people around me, perhaps by God Himself.

And suddenly I remembered that afternoon with Jan.

Soap and water.

That was all.

And yet somehow, it wasn’t.