It will be in all the local papers tomorrow: That strange American woman finally washed her windows! After six years!
They're standing downstairs, I just know they are, discreetly camouflaged by the woods next door, our small city's answer to Central Park, and they can see her scrubbing away as if she were a housewife.
Which, technically, I am, but I'm also the proud possessor of a coffee mug sporting a Donna Reed type, in apron and high heels, captioned: A CLEAN HOUSE IS THE SIGN OF A WASTED LIFE. Usually this is so. Sometimes, if you're a little down, or you've actually hit most of your deadlines, cleaning is a great way of not thinking about stuff, and the side effect is that everything is so sparkly! All those mental cobwebs shift sideways, without actually departing, as I whack the spiderwebs off the ceiling with the broom. All that dust, six years of dust on our windows. Gone! Oh, except for those few stubborn streaks that, no matter what, refuse to be ousted. So I used water, and I used this green stuff called Frosch and after that didn't totally work I used some Windex and some other stuff, and the light came through and illuminated a few streaks . . . but they do look much nicer. Also, you can now see the floor in my daughter's room, since she and I threw out torn Barbie clothes, plus many small plastic parts of forgotten toys, and huge chunks of a Playmobil princess house that she's outgrown. Now the things she loves stand out more: the obsidian parrot we brought her from Brazil, the two-headed dragon (the perfect gift for a girl with two older brothers) that she demanded for Christmas one year. The only part of cleaning I enjoy is finding things that had been missing for months, sometimes years. It is so distracting to find the Alumnae magazine from my high school that I almost start reading it . . . but I kept cleaning. The more I clean, the more my head empties. If I keep this up long enough, I'll lower my I.Q. significantly. I better get back to blogging.
No comments:
Post a Comment