cleaning the incense burners

.
Today, after cleaning up, stoking the fire, scraping snow off the car, shopping for food, getting some gas and returning home, I continued on a 'little stuff' frequency and decided to clean the incense burners -- one on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen, one on a shelf in a living area.

The refrigerator bowl that serves as an incense burner sits in front of a broken, metal head of a buddha or bodhisattva. It was given to me by a used-stuff-store owner on condition that I would care for it and love it. It has a chunk out of it in the quadrant behind and above the right ear. I've done my best to follow the man's injunction.

The second bowl -- something my son made in second or third grade -- sits in front of a many-armed Kuan Yin that I fell in love with as it sat in a store window. The store sold things like women's pocket books, greeting cards and other quick-hit gifts. Not exactly chintzy, but close. But the statue in the store window grabbed me by the short hairs. I saved up in tight times and bought it.

Every morning, I light a stick of incense for each bowl, each statue. I put the incense in the bowl, bow and go about the business of waking up. The incense offers a fragrance for a while -- burning from its tip-beginning to its seat in the salt that has turned tan from burning sticks. The End. But there is always a little something left over ... little bits that gave the sticks a purchase point ... and those bits and pieces mount up and, eventually, make it difficult to add another. The bowls need to be sieved out and the bits and pieces dealt with.

Today was the day for dealing with the accumulations. I poured the salt into a sieve over a piece of paper towel and shook it gently. The salt went through the holes in the sieve, but the fewmets, as I think of them, remained. Where once I might have saved them frugally and and ground them up for future use, now I pitch them in the garbage. I am getting lazy, lazier, laziest.

But today, with each of the two sievings, I marveled at the number of fewmets. There must have been 50-75 for each bowl. Fifty to 75 bits of one yesterday and another. Fifty to 75 yesterdays. Fifty to 75 reminders ... but of what? What happened to those days and the scents that filled them? Where did they go? Is there a cosmic dust bin for yesterdays? And if so, what happens when it gets full? I know that those yesterdays exist -- I've got the fewmets to prove it. But where are they?

I'm not sad. Just curious.
.