Palliative Care: Our House and Our Heroic Cleaning Lady

We have a wonderful cleaning lady who appears on time twice weekly and does what she can with us. But now that we have a few days off and I'm trying to do what my daughter calls "deep cleaning," I see that our cleaning lady's strenuous efforts are little more than a band-aid on a gaping wound.  I daydream about the staff of eight or ten that would, in Victorian times, have routinely maintained a home this size. Of course if we'd lived back then we'd be dealing with Victorian drains and antibiotics wouldn't have been invented . . . still, thoughts of a brisk, efficient maid tidying up the bookshelves while another brisk, efficient maid goes for the kitchen and yet a third folds the laundry--ah, these are pleasant dreams.

Part One: The Sofa

Looks lovely and is great to lie on. Folded all the blankets strewn around by late-night TV watchers, dusted the pillows, then pulled the whole thing out from the wall. So that's where two blue crocs that don't match went! I've been wearing their mates for the last six months. Also a pair of green crocs that my daughter may have outgrown, a pair of black crocs, a single multicolored croc whose mate is probably upstairs near my ballet barre, centuries of dust, old Cheerios, and a pair of orange glasses decorated with a dead spider.

Part Two: The Kitchen

Yesterday, one of the teenagers removed eight bags of garbage and indicated the fact on the calendar, where he also indicated that another sibling must now "do it twice!" or more, since he's done that himself . . . my teenagers love to fight about whose turn it is to remove the trash. Oh, excuse me, in my opinion. Meanwhile, the stove is a grease slick, the wok needs cleaning before I make dinner tonight, and what am I doing three flights up in my freezing study typing?

Part Three: The Bedroom

I removed the ancient quilt that was leaving a trail of feathers behind it, removed it as far as the laundry pile in the bathroom. Did I say pile? I meant the laundry mountain. Several laundry baskets of clean folded laundry adorn the bedroom floor. I won't tell you how long they've been there.

But we threw out the paper trash a few days ago!