The Sweeper

     We had our carpets cleaned yesterday.  The need was certainly past due.  My delinquency or outright neglect reminded me of a man I call “the sweeper”.  For years around the corner from my school I would see a man working in his yard.  More than once I paused to watch him.  He was middle-aged, modestly dressed usually in slacks and undershirt.  There was nothing particularly distinguishing about him.  He may have considered himself an insignificant man in an insignificant yard. 

The yard was but a small piece of hard packed ground no larger than the free throw lane on a basketball court.  Bordered on two sides by chain link it lay before a tiny trailer on the corner of an aging trailer park in central Phoenix.  With its steel and aluminum containers packed in, it bore no semblance of the “mobile home” parks of its suburban snowbird counterparts.  There were no vestiges of better days gone by.  

     Each day the man dutifully swept the yard clear of debris and deposited it in a nearby trash can.  Afterward he would return to sweep the dirt into a parallel pattern of brush strokes.  He worked slowly and methodically as would an artist before his canvas.  It was his yard, and he labored in it equal to any grand estate.  I always imagined that the condition of his home inside was the same.

     Whether or not he considered himself significant, he was significant to me.  His perseverance in exercising stewardship for what was likely a rental property was significant.  His caring attitude for that small patch of ground reminded me that each of us receives a small patch of this planet for which we are responsible.  For some of us it is a spacious house in the burbs.  For others it is simply a tiny trailer in the urban core of our cities; and for even others it may be but a shopping cart.  Regardless of our leases or mortgages, we are each only renters of our property.  It is ours for a while; eventually it will pass into the care of others.  The same is true for our many possessions.

     We hear much about the size of our footprint on this planet.  We are asked to be responsible users of its resources.  In this period of wanton consumerism of the holiday season and in what to a great degree has become a disposable society, “the sweeper” reminds me of my responsibility to be good a steward of the gifts I receive.  May I learn to prize all that I have as much as a man who daily sweeps clean a small patch of dirt. 

~ Joyeux Noël